CODEWITHSUNDEEP
jsoncompressiongzip
A-dude
A-dude

Reputation: 171

Why are we still using Gzip in 2017?

I think Gzip was being used back in 2002 or earlier than that. It's 2017 and we are still using Gzip in most of the places. Isn't there any better alternative?

Personally, I have to reduce payload while sending data(JSON strings) from server to app and vice versa. I see there are better compression algorithms but they take much more time. I am just afraid if I am missing something? Or Gzip is still the best?

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1085

Answers (2)

Adenilson Cavalcanti
Adenilson Cavalcanti

Reputation: 84

I've got 2 cents to add to this (old) discussion.

Concerning zlib, there is still plenty of performance to squeeze from it, as we have done in Chromium's zlib (https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/third_party/zlib/). It is now between 1.7x to 2x faster at decompression than plain vanilla zlib thanks to using SIMD optimizations.

Second, even though zstd is pretty amazing (in all aspects: code base, compression techniques, community), contributing to it is bound to acceptance of Facebook's contribution agreement (CLA: https://code.facebook.com/cla/individual) that has a specific clause that forces individuals and companies to grant a perpetual an irrevocable patent license to Facebook to any patent that may be related to code contributions.

Until they decide to address this issue, I can't see many companies willing to contribute to zstd.

Upvotes: 2

Mark Adler
Mark Adler

Reputation: 112502

It's way older than you think. gzip goes back to 1992.

Until very recently, a little less than a year ago, there wasn't anything significantly better in the particular niche of compression speed, decompression speed, and compression ratio that gzip lives in. However there is now zstd, written by Yann Collet, which improves on all of those metrics in that niche. I would expect that zstd or a descendant will eventually supplant gzip/deflate for its current applications.

Upvotes: 3

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