A Fast Implementation of Deflate

We present a fast implementation of the Deflate protocol that is substantially faster than the fastest version of the Zlib software package, yet maintains full compatibility to the Deflate standard. Our solution outperforms the fastest Zlib version by a factor of 2.6 and higher (in compression time) yet demonstrates only a negligible drop-off in terms of compression ratio. The basic building blocks for our solution are a fast LZ77 compressor (the LZ4 package) and a standard Huffman encoding package (Zlib). In the paper we describe how a non-trivial combination constructed around these building blocks achieves the aforementioned performance and compatibility.