Snappy (software)

Snappy (software)

Snappy (previously known as Zippy) is a fast data compression and decompression library developed by Google based on ideas from LZ77. It was designed to be very fast and stable, but not to achieve a high compression ratio. Compression speed is 250 MB/s and decompression speed is 500 MB/s using a single threaded, 64-bit Core i7 processor. The compression ratio is 20–100% lower than gzip.

Snappy is widely used in Google projects like BigTable, MapReduce, and in compression of RPC. Decompression is tested to detect any errors in the compressed stream. Snappy does not use inline assembler and is portable. It is optimized for 64-bit, little-endian architectures, primary x86_64.