I thought I'd throw a quick post as SHARC 0.9.10 beta has just been released (https://github.com/centaurean/sharc). It is faster than ever, and now ships with a nice stream and buffers API making it easy to integrate in any project.
To go straight to the point, here are a few benchmarks made using http://quixdb.github.io/squash, a nice compression abstraction library which features a benchmarking tool. The benchmark actually tests compression/decompression of the famous enwik8 file, using the fastest mode for all codecs. Here is the compression ratio :
Compression ratio is not the best but very close to the other faster algorithms, and even closer in 0.9.10 beta. Now here is the speed on Opteron 4170, Core i7, i5, i3, Atom D525, and ARM 71 to have a full processor range :
On enwik8, the higher ratio compression mode available (sharc -c1, not tested here) has roughly the same ratio as the default LZ4 compression mode (about 1.76) but is 40-50% faster.
Please feel free to react if you have interesting test results on your platforms ! You can download sources and multi platform binaries here : https://github.com/centaurean/sharc/releases