Arch's Switch To Zstd: ~0.8% Increase In Package Size For ~1300% Speedup In Decompression Time

Arch Linux has been working the past several months on transitioning to Zstd-compressed packages in place of XZ compression for faster package installation. At the end of December that package compression scheme changed and the results are impressive.

The package compression ratio for XZ and Zstd are similar and when recompressing all of Arch's packages with Zstd yielded a total increase of about 0.8% for all packages combined. However, the decompression time for all Arch packages saw a ~1300% speedup. Also promising is that no issues have come up yet in their testing.

As Arch packages get organically updated, the transition to Zstd will continue as long as the packagers are using the latest development tools that default to the Zstandard compression algorithm.

More details via arch-announce.