Please go easy one me, this is my first posting, though i've been casually studying compression since I was a teen.
In my daytime life I spend a lot of time working on web sites, and find the need for two kinds of deflate tools:
1. Fast, for on-the-fly compression of dynamic content
2. Tight, for compress-once / serve-many content
For case 2, it seems the current best at hand is AdvanceCOMP, which I believe uses the 7-zip and zopfli engines.
In order to eek out the last few bytes, it can be set to an iterative mode, which I assume experiments with different parsings to see how it effects the huffman stage.
For case 1, currently zlib at "default" level with max window / memory seems common practice.
Now, having seen the performance of tools like zstd, I wonder how much of that expertise could be put to use on building "the best" deflate for the two common uses.
I realise a lot of work is going into trying to supplant deflate in the general world, but look how long it took for brotli to get in "all" the browsers...
I guess my questions are:
- What deflate libs are there that can compress (as fast but tighter) or (as tight but faster) than zlib?
- Is there an "optimal" deflate lib for offline compression that isn't just an iterative guess?
--
Curtis
P.S. I have looked around at various "optimised" zlibs and alternatives... none of them seem to have retained their competitive edge, though I'm quite happy to be shown to be wrong![]()