Zstd 1.5 Released With Big Performance Improvements

Zstd has already been enjoying phenomenal growth throughout the open-source software ecosystem thanks to its feature set and impressive performance, but can it get even better? Yes, with Zstd 1.5 that is out today there are some more mighty impressive performance improvements.

Zstd 1.5 improves the middle-level compression speed thanks to a new default match finder, improved high-level compression ratio speeds, and there are also a variety of decompression speed improvements. Many of the Zstd 1.5 speed improvements can be measured at 10~25%+ and in some cases substantially more, especially on the compression side but the decompression speed has also been enjoying big speed-ups.

Zstd 1.5's dynamic library also now supports multi-threading by default, various APIs promoted to stable, and a variety of other changes.

More details and downloads with today's Zstd 1.5 release via GitHub.

I'll be updating our compress-zstd test profile to Zstd 1.5 shortly and running a number of benchmarks on this exciting update to Facebook's Zstandard compression algorithm implementation. The Zstd 1.5 update should also be working its way to the mainline Linux kernel's implementation, hopefully with 5.14.