LZ4 vs Snappy
A side-by-side feature comparison.
Summary
LZ4 and Snappy are the two real-time compressors of choice for databases, filesystems, and streaming pipelines. Both prioritize speed over ratio. LZ4 is slightly faster and slightly better; Snappy is more deeply embedded inside the Hadoop ecosystem.
Feature comparison
| Feature | LZ4 | Snappy framed |
|---|---|---|
| Author | Yann Collet | |
| Compression speed | Very fast | Very fast |
| Decompression speed | Memory speed | Memory speed |
| Compression ratio | Slightly better | Slightly worse |
| Splittable for Hadoop | Yes (LZ4 frame) | Yes (snappy framed) |
| Inside ZFS / Btrfs | Yes | No |
| Library license | BSD | Apache 2.0 |
About LZ4
LZ4 is an extremely fast compression algorithm focused on speed rather than ratio. It can compress at gigabytes per second and decompress even faster, making it the choice when CPU is the bottleneck. ZFS, the Linux kernel boot image, and many databases use LZ4 internally.
About Snappy framed
Snappy is Google's fast compression library used inside BigTable, LevelDB, RocksDB, and many Hadoop pipelines. The framed .sz file format wraps Snappy chunks in a stream that can be split and processed in parallel — important for Hadoop's file processing model where a compressor that cannot be split forces the whole file to be processed by a single worker.
Read the full Snappy framed guide →
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