Comments on: PIGZ: Parallel GZIP

By: Sachin Garg

Sachin Garg — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 19:16:00 +0000

You will need to compile it yourself (its just code but it should work on windows).

It will work 2 times faster by using both cores if your CPU is dual core. 4x faster if you have a quad core, but no speed up if you have a single-core CPU.

By: Laura

Laura — Fri, 23 Oct 2009 17:12:50 +0000

Does this run on Windows systems? Is the compression faster than something like gzip?

By: Eugene

Eugene — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 10:05:42 +0000

Nice article. Thanks. :) Eugene

By: Mark Adler

Mark Adler — Sun, 19 Oct 2008 23:50:48 +0000

Version 2.0 of the parallel implementation of gzip called “pigz” is
available here:

http://zlib.net/pigz/

pigz exploits multiple processors and multiple cores for compression.
The use of threads has been completely rewritten to be more efficient
and clean. It compiles on Unixish operating systems that provide the
zlib and pthread libraries.

If you have success or failure in compiling and using pigz, I would
appreciate knowing about either way. Thanks.

By: Earl Colby Pottinger

Earl Colby Pottinger — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 12:30:26 +0000

Girlfriend: What is your hardware/software setup?

By: girlfriend

girlfriend — Sat, 14 Jun 2008 09:11:28 +0000

According to my personal benchmarks, pigz doesn’t speed up compression, unlike pbzip. In fact, in some cases it’s performance may be slower than single-threaded version!

By: Andrew Polar

Andrew Polar — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 21:01:32 +0000

I wish to use this opportunity and ask Mark Adler a question. In 1990 Martucci published article regarding usage of simple predictor in combination with entropy encoder for compression of images. Following this article it is possible to write image compression routine of 300 lines that makes photo images to be compressed as 2.5 to 1. Three years later PNG format was created that required 20 times longer code and compressed photo images typically as 1.7 to 1. PNG format happened to be incorporated into major browsers. 16 years after mentioned publication Microsoft introduced HD Photo that compress images to the same ratio as in Marucci method published in 1990. And few years ago JPEG2000 anounced format that is about 7% better than Martucci suggested in 1990. The question is
Wouldn’t that be nice to incorporate new format into all browsers that require 300 lines of coding, so programmers will be able to generate images on the fly in web applications without using so called new approach of Microsoft that is called Silverlight.
Thanks,
Andrew Polar

By: Sachin Garg

Sachin Garg — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 01:40:18 +0000

Just use the link to version 1.7, its in the comment above yours.

By: Kristiyan Georgiev

Kristiyan Georgiev — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 20:18:19 +0000

http://zlib.net/pigz16.c.gz is broken, can you point me to a different location?

Cheers,
kris

By: Sachin Garg

Sachin Garg — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 18:33:45 +0000

Mark has released another update, version 1.7 decompresses the first entry of a zip file (if deflated), and compresses to a single-entry zip file if requested with –zip.

http://zlib.net/pigz17.c.gz

By: Mark Adler

Mark Adler — Sat, 14 Apr 2007 06:24:12 +0000

That link won’t work. The latest distributed version is 1.6, and the link is http://zlib.net/pigz16.c.gz.

It will also optionally compress to the zlib format.