Snappy (zippy), a data compression library from Bigtable

Google has released the Snappy library under the Apache 2.0 license. This library for compression / decompression is not aimed at maximum compression or compatibility with other libraries, but at maximum speed. For example, compared to the fastest zlib mode, Snappy is about an order of magnitude faster for most incoming data, but archives are 20–100% larger in size. On a single Core i7 core in 64-bit Snappy mode, the compression rate is at least 250 MB / s more, and decompression is at least 500 MB / s.

Snappy is widely used in Google, in different systems from BigTable and MapReduce to internal RPC systems (in some presentations it was mentioned under the name Zippy).

See the readme file for more information. Benchmarks in comparison with other libraries (zlib, LZO, LZF, FastLZ and QuickLZ) are supplied with the source code.