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mort96yesterday at 6:08 PM2 repliesview on HN

I just did some interactive shell loops and globs to compress everything and output CSV which I processed into an ASCII table, so I don't exactly have a pipeline I can modify and re-run the tests with compression speeds added ... but I can run some more interactive shell-glob-and-loop-based analysis to give you decompression speeds:

    ~/tmp/pdfbench $ hyperfine --warmup 2 \
    'for x in zst/*; do zstd -d >/dev/null <"$x"; done' \
    'for x in gz/*; do gzip -d >/dev/null <"$x"; done' \
    'for x in xz/*; do xz -d >/dev/null <"$x"; done' \
    'for x in br/*; do brotli -d >/dev/null <"$x"; done'
    Benchmark 1: for x in zst/*; do zstd -d >/dev/null <"$x"; done
      Time (mean ± σ):     164.6 ms ±   1.3 ms    [User: 83.6 ms, System: 72.4 ms]
      Range (min … max):   162.0 ms … 166.9 ms    17 runs
    
    Benchmark 2: for x in gz/*; do gzip -d >/dev/null <"$x"; done
      Time (mean ± σ):     143.0 ms ±   1.0 ms    [User: 87.6 ms, System: 43.6 ms]
      Range (min … max):   141.4 ms … 145.6 ms    20 runs
    
    Benchmark 3: for x in xz/*; do xz -d >/dev/null <"$x"; done
      Time (mean ± σ):     981.7 ms ±   1.6 ms    [User: 891.5 ms, System: 93.0 ms]
      Range (min … max):   978.7 ms … 984.3 ms    10 runs
    
    Benchmark 4: for x in br/*; do brotli -d >/dev/null <"$x"; done
      Time (mean ± σ):     254.5 ms ±   2.5 ms    [User: 172.9 ms, System: 67.4 ms]
      Range (min … max):   252.3 ms … 260.5 ms    11 runs
    
    Summary
      for x in gz/*; do gzip -d >/dev/null <"$x"; done ran
        1.15 ± 0.01 times faster than for x in zst/*; do zstd -d >/dev/null <"$x"; done
        1.78 ± 0.02 times faster than for x in br/*; do brotli -d >/dev/null <"$x"; done
        6.87 ± 0.05 times faster than for x in xz/*; do xz -d >/dev/null <"$x"; done
As expected, xz is super slow. Gzip is fastest, zstd being somewhat slower, brotli slower again but still much faster than xz.

    +-------+-------+--------+-------+
    | gzip  | zstd  | brotli | xz    |
    +-------+-------+--------+-------+
    | 143ms | 165ms | 255ms  | 982ms |
    +-------+-------+--------+-------+
I honestly expected zstd to win here.

Replies

terrellnyesterday at 6:25 PM

Zstd should not be slower than gzip to decompress here. Given that it has inflated the files to be bigger than the uncompressed data, it has to do more work to decompress. This seems like a bug, or somehow measuring the wrong thing, and not the expected behavior.

show 1 reply
noname120yesterday at 6:26 PM

Thanks a lot. Interestingly Brotli’s author mentioned here that zstd is 2× faster at decompressing, which roughly matches your numbers:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46035817

I’m also really surprised that gzip performs better here. Is there some kind of hardware acceleration or the like?