This package provides various compression algorithms.
* [zstandard](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/tree/master/zstd#zstd) compression and decompression in pure Go.
* [S2](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/tree/master/s2#s2-compression) is a high performance replacement for Snappy.
* Optimized [deflate](https://godoc.org/github.com/klauspost/compress/flate) packages which can be used as a dropin replacement for [gzip](https://godoc.org/github.com/klauspost/compress/gzip), [zip](https://godoc.org/github.com/klauspost/compress/zip) and [zlib](https://godoc.org/github.com/klauspost/compress/zlib).
* [snappy](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/tree/master/snappy) is a drop-in replacement for `github.com/golang/snappy` offering better compression and concurrent streams.
* [huff0](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/tree/master/huff0) and [FSE](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/tree/master/fse) implementations for raw entropy encoding.
* [gzhttp](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/tree/master/gzhttp) Provides client and server wrappers for handling gzipped requests efficiently.
* [pgzip](https://github.com/klauspost/pgzip) is a separate package that provides a very fast parallel gzip implementation.
* zstd: Fix amd64 not always detecting corrupt data https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/785
* zstd: Various minor improvements by @greatroar in https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/788 https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/794 https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/795
* s2: Support io.ReaderAt in ReadSeeker. https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/747
* s2c/s2sx: Use concurrent decoding. https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/746
* Jan 21st, 2023 (v1.15.15)
* deflate: Improve level 7-9 by @klauspost in https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/739
* zstd: Add delta encoding support by @greatroar in https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/728
* zstd: Various speed improvements by @greatroar https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/741 https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/734 https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/736 https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/744 https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/743 https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/745
* gzhttp: Add SuffixETag() and DropETag() options to prevent ETag collisions on compressed responses by @willbicks in https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/740
* zstd: Allow to ignore checksum checking by @WojciechMula [#572](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/572)
* s2: Fix incorrect seek for io.SeekEnd in [#575](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/575)
* Apr 26, 2022 (v1.15.2)
* zstd: Add x86-64 assembly for decompression on streams and blocks. Contributed by [@WojciechMula](https://github.com/WojciechMula). Typically 2x faster. [#528](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/528) [#531](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/531) [#545](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/545) [#537](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/537)
* zstd: Add options to ZipDecompressor and fixes [#539](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/539)
* s2: Use sorted search for index [#555](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/555)
* Minimum version is Go 1.16, added CI test on 1.18.
* Mar 11, 2022 (v1.15.1)
* huff0: Add x86 assembly of Decode4X by @WojciechMula in [#512](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/512)
* zstd: Reuse zip decoders in [#514](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/514)
* zstd: Detect extra block data and report as corrupted in [#520](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/520)
* zstd: Handle zero sized frame content size stricter in [#521](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/521)
* zstd: Add stricter block size checks in [#523](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/523)
* zstd: Refactor decoder by @klauspost in [#498](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/498)
* zstd: Add stream encoding without goroutines by @klauspost in [#505](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/505)
* huff0: Prevent single blocks exceeding 16 bits by @klauspost in[#507](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/507)
* flate: Inline literal emission by @klauspost in [#509](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/509)
* gzhttp: Add zstd to transport by @klauspost in [#400](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/400)
* gzhttp: Make content-type optional by @klauspost in [#510](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/510)
Both compression and decompression now supports "synchronous" stream operations. This means that whenever "concurrency" is set to 1, they will operate without spawning goroutines.
Stream decompression is now faster on asynchronous, since the goroutine allocation much more effectively splits the workload. On typical streams this will typically use 2 cores fully for decompression. When a stream has finished decoding no goroutines will be left over, so decoders can now safely be pooled and still be garbage collected.
While the release has been extensively tested, it is recommended to testing when upgrading.
* flate: Fix rare huffman only (-2) corruption. [#503](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/503)
* zip: Update deprecated CreateHeaderRaw to correctly call CreateRaw by @saracen in [#502](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/502)
* zip: don't read data descriptor early by @saracen in [#501](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/501) #501
* huff0: Use static decompression buffer up to 30% faster by @klauspost in [#499](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/499) [#500](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/500)
* s2: Faster compression with Go v1.18 and amd64 microarch level 3+. [#484](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/484) [#486](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/486)
* Jan 25, 2022 (v1.14.2)
* zstd: improve header decoder by @dsnet [#476](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/476)
* gzhttp: Add header to skip compression [#389](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/389)
* s2: Improve speed with bigger output margin [#395](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/395)
* Jun 3, 2021 (v1.13.0)
* Added [gzhttp](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/tree/master/gzhttp#gzip-handler) which allows wrapping HTTP servers and clients with GZIP compressors.
* zstd: Detect short invalid signatures [#382](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/382)
* zstd: Spawn decoder goroutine only if needed. [#380](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/380)
* s2: Load after checking src limit on amd64. [#362](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/362)
* s2sx: Limit max executable size [#368](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/368)
* Apr 14, 2021 (v1.12.1)
* snappy package removed. Upstream added as dependency.
* s2: Better compression in "best" mode [#353](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/353)
* s2sx: Add stdin input and detect pre-compressed from signature [#352](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/352)
* s2c/s2d: Add http as possible input [#348](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/348)
* s2c/s2d/s2sx: Always truncate when writing files [#352](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/352)
* zstd: Reduce memory usage further when using [WithLowerEncoderMem](https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/klauspost/compress/zstd#WithLowerEncoderMem) [#346](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/346)
* s2: Fix potential problem with amd64 assembly and profilers [#349](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/349)
* zstd: Big speedup on small dictionary encodes [#344](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/344) [#345](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/345)
* zstd: Improve speed of fastest compression mode by 5-10% [#241](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/241)
* zstd: Skip creating encoders when not needed. [#238](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/238)
* Feb 27, 2020: (v1.10.2)
* Close to 50% speedup in inflate (gzip/zip decompression). [#236](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/236) [#234](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/234) [#232](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/232)
* Reduce deflate level 1-6 memory usage up to 59%. [#227](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/227)
* Feb 18, 2020: (v1.10.1)
* Fix zstd crash when resetting multiple times without sending data. [#226](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/226)
* deflate: Fix dictionary use on level 1-6. [#224](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/224)
* Remove deflate writer reference when closing. [#224](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/224)
* Feb 4, 2020: (v1.10.0)
* Add optional dictionary to [stateless deflate](https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/klauspost/compress/flate?tab=doc#StatelessDeflate). Breaking change, send `nil` for previous behaviour. [#216](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/216)
* Fix buffer overflow on repeated small block deflate. [#218](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/218)
* Allow copying content from an existing ZIP file without decompressing+compressing. [#214](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/214)
* Added [S2](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/tree/master/s2#s2-compression) AMD64 assembler and various optimizations. Stream speed >10GB/s. [#186](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/186)
</details>
<details>
<summary>See changes prior to v1.10.0</summary>
* Jan 20,2020 (v1.9.8) Optimize gzip/deflate with better size estimates and faster table generation. [#207](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/207) by [luyu6056](https://github.com/luyu6056), [#206](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/206).
* Jan 11, 2020: S2 Encode/Decode will use provided buffer if capacity is big enough. [#204](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/204)
* Jan 5, 2020: (v1.9.7) Fix another zstd regression in v1.9.5 - v1.9.6 removed.
* Jan 4, 2020: (v1.9.6) Regression in v1.9.5 fixed causing corrupt zstd encodes in rare cases.
* Jan 4, 2020: Faster IO in [s2c + s2d commandline tools](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/tree/master/s2#commandline-tools) compression/decompression. [#192](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/192)
* Dec 29, 2019: Removed v1.9.5 since fuzz tests showed a compatibility problem with the reference zstandard decoder.
* Dec 29, 2019: [zip](https://godoc.org/github.com/klauspost/compress/zip) package updated with latest Go features
* Dec 29, 2019: zstd: Single segment flag condintions tweaked. [#197](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/197)
* Dec 18, 2019: s2: Faster compression when ReadFrom is used. [#198](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/198)
* Dec 10, 2019: s2: Fix repeat length output when just above at 16MB limit.
* Dec 10, 2019: zstd: Add function to get decoder as io.ReadCloser. [#191](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/191)
* Dec 3, 2019: (v1.9.4) S2: limit max repeat length. [#188](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/188)
* Dec 3, 2019: Add [WithNoEntropyCompression](https://godoc.org/github.com/klauspost/compress/zstd#WithNoEntropyCompression) to zstd [#187](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/187)
* Dec 3, 2019: Reduce memory use for tests. Check for leaked goroutines.
* Nov 28, 2019 (v1.9.3) Less allocations in stateless deflate.
* Nov 28, 2019: 5-20% Faster huff0 decode. Impacts zstd as well. [#184](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/184)
* Nov 12, 2019 (v1.9.2) Added [Stateless Compression](#stateless-compression) for gzip/deflate.
* Nov 12, 2019: Fixed zstd decompression of large single blocks. [#180](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/180)
* Nov 11, 2019: Set default [s2c](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/tree/master/s2#commandline-tools) block size to 4MB.
* Nov 11, 2019: Reduce inflate memory use by 1KB.
* Nov 10, 2019: Less allocations in deflate bit writer.
* Nov 10, 2019: Fix inconsistent error returned by zstd decoder.
* Oct 28, 2019 (v1.9.1) ztsd: Fix crash when compressing blocks. [#174](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/174)
* Oct 24, 2019 (v1.9.0) zstd: Fix rare data corruption [#173](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/173)
* Oct 24, 2019 zstd: Fix huff0 out of buffer write [#171](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/171) and always return errors [#172](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/172)
* Oct 10, 2019: Big deflate rewrite, 30-40% faster with better compression [#105](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/105)
</details>
<details>
<summary>See changes prior to v1.9.0</summary>
* Oct 10, 2019: (v1.8.6) zstd: Allow partial reads to get flushed data. [#169](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/169)
* Oct 3, 2019: Fix inconsistent results on broken zstd streams.
* Sep 25, 2019: Added `-rm` (remove source files) and `-q` (no output except errors) to `s2c` and `s2d` [commands](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/tree/master/s2#commandline-tools)
* Sep 7, 2019: zstd: Added [WithWindowSize](https://godoc.org/github.com/klauspost/compress/zstd#WithWindowSize), contributed by [ianwilkes](https://github.com/ianwilkes).
* Sep 5, 2019: (v1.8.2) Add [WithZeroFrames](https://godoc.org/github.com/klauspost/compress/zstd#WithZeroFrames) which adds full zero payload block encoding option.
* Aug 26, 2019: (v1.8.1) S2: 1-2% compression increase in "better" compression mode.
* Aug 26, 2019: zstd: Check maximum size of Huffman 1X compressed literals while decoding.
* Aug 24, 2019: (v1.8.0) Added [S2 compression](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/tree/master/s2#s2-compression), a high performance replacement for Snappy.
* Aug 21, 2019: (v1.7.6) Fixed minor issues found by fuzzer. One could lead to zstd not decompressing.
* Aug 18, 2019: Add [fuzzit](https://fuzzit.dev/) continuous fuzzing.
* Aug 14, 2019: zstd: Skip incompressible data 2x faster. [#147](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/147)
* Aug 4, 2019 (v1.7.5): Better literal compression. [#146](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/146)
* Aug 4, 2019: Faster zstd compression. [#143](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/143) [#144](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/144)
* Aug 4, 2019: Faster zstd decompression. [#145](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/145) [#143](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/143) [#142](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/pull/142)
* July 15, 2019 (v1.7.4): Fix double EOF block in rare cases on zstd encoder.
* July 15, 2019 (v1.7.3): Minor speedup/compression increase in default zstd encoder.
* July 14, 2019: zstd decoder: Fix decompression error on multiple uses with mixed content.
* Jun 23, 2018: Merged [Go 1.11 inflate optimizations](https://go-review.googlesource.com/c/go/+/102235). Go 1.9 is now required. Backwards compatible version tagged with [v1.3.0](https://github.com/klauspost/compress/releases/tag/v1.3.0).
* Apr 2, 2018: Added [huff0](https://godoc.org/github.com/klauspost/compress/huff0) en/decoder. Experimental for now, API may change.
* Mar 4, 2018: Added [FSE Entropy](https://godoc.org/github.com/klauspost/compress/fse) en/decoder. Experimental for now, API may change.
* Nov 3, 2017: Add compression [Estimate](https://godoc.org/github.com/klauspost/compress#Estimate) function.
* May 28, 2017: Reduce allocations when resetting decoder.
* Apr 02, 2017: Change back to official crc32, since changes were merged in Go 1.7.
* Jan 14, 2017: Reduce stack pressure due to array copies. See [Issue #18625](https://github.com/golang/go/issues/18625).
* Oct 25, 2016: Level 2-4 have been rewritten and now offers significantly better performance than before.
* Oct 20, 2016: Port zlib changes from Go 1.7 to fix zlib writer issue. Please update.
* Oct 16, 2016: Go 1.7 changes merged. Apples to apples this package is a few percent faster, but has a significantly better balance between speed and compression per level.
* Mar 24, 2016: Always attempt Huffman encoding on level 4-7. This improves base 64 encoded data compression.
* Mar 24, 2016: Small speedup for level 1-3.
* Feb 19, 2016: Faster bit writer, level -2 is 15% faster, level 1 is 4% faster.
* Feb 19, 2016: Handle small payloads faster in level 1-3.
* Feb 19, 2016: [Rebalanced compression levels](https://blog.klauspost.com/rebalancing-deflate-compression-levels/), so there is a more even progresssion in terms of compression. New default level is 5.
* Feb 14, 2016: Snappy: Merge upstream changes.
* Feb 14, 2016: Snappy: Fix aggressive skipping.
* Feb 14, 2016: Snappy: Update benchmark.
* Feb 13, 2016: Deflate: Fixed assembler problem that could lead to sub-optimal compression.
* Feb 12, 2016: Snappy: Added AMD64 SSE 4.2 optimizations to matching, which makes easy to compress material run faster. Typical speedup is around 25%.
* Feb 9, 2016: Added Snappy package fork. This version is 5-7% faster, much more on hard to compress content.
* Jan 30, 2016: Optimize level 1 to 3 by not considering static dictionary or storing uncompressed. ~4-5% speedup.
* Jan 16, 2016: Optimization on deflate level 1,2,3 compression.
* Jan 8 2016: Merge [CL 18317](https://go-review.googlesource.com/#/c/18317): fix reading, writing of zip64 archives.
* Dec 8 2015: Make level 1 and -2 deterministic even if write size differs.
* Dec 8 2015: Split encoding functions, so hashing and matching can potentially be inlined. 1-3% faster on AMD64. 5% faster on other platforms.
* Optimized [deflate](https://godoc.org/github.com/klauspost/compress/flate) packages which can be used as a dropin replacement for [gzip](https://godoc.org/github.com/klauspost/compress/gzip), [zip](https://godoc.org/github.com/klauspost/compress/zip) and [zlib](https://godoc.org/github.com/klauspost/compress/zlib).
You may also be interested in [pgzip](https://github.com/klauspost/pgzip), which is a drop in replacement for gzip, which support multithreaded compression on big files and the optimized [crc32](https://github.com/klauspost/crc32) package used by these packages.
The packages contains the same as the standard library, so you can use the godoc for that: [gzip](http://golang.org/pkg/compress/gzip/), [zip](http://golang.org/pkg/archive/zip/), [zlib](http://golang.org/pkg/compress/zlib/), [flate](http://golang.org/pkg/compress/flate/).
Currently there is only minor speedup on decompression (mostly CRC32 calculation).
Memory usage is typically 1MB for a Writer. stdlib is in the same range.
If you expect to have a lot of concurrently allocated Writers consider using
This package offers stateless compression as a special option for gzip/deflate.
It will do compression but without maintaining any state between Write calls.
This means there will be no memory kept between Write calls, but compression and speed will be suboptimal.
This is only relevant in cases where you expect to run many thousands of compressors concurrently,
but with very little activity. This is *not* intended for regular web servers serving individual requests.
Because of this, the size of actual Write calls will affect output size.
In gzip, specify level `-3` / `gzip.StatelessCompression` to enable.
For direct deflate use, NewStatelessWriter and StatelessDeflate are available. See [documentation](https://godoc.org/github.com/klauspost/compress/flate#NewStatelessWriter)
A `bufio.Writer` can of course be used to control write sizes. For example, to use a 4KB buffer:
This will only use up to 4KB in memory when the writer is idle.
Compression is almost always worse than the fastest compression level
and each write will allocate (a little) memory.
# Performance Update 2018
It has been a while since we have been looking at the speed of this package compared to the standard library, so I thought I would re-do my tests and give some overall recommendations based on the current state. All benchmarks have been performed with Go 1.10 on my Desktop Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2600 CPU @3.40GHz. Since I last ran the tests, I have gotten more RAM, which means tests with big files are no longer limited by my SSD.
The raw results are in my [updated spreadsheet](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1nuNE2nPfuINCZJRMt6wFWhKpToF95I47XjSsc-1rbPQ/edit?usp=sharing). Due to cgo changes and upstream updates i could not get the cgo version of gzip to compile. Instead I included the [zstd](https://github.com/datadog/zstd) cgo implementation. If I get cgo gzip to work again, I might replace the results in the sheet.
The columns to take note of are: *MB/s* - the throughput. *Reduction* - the data size reduction in percent of the original. *Rel Speed* relative speed compared to the standard library at the same level. *Smaller* - how many percent smaller is the compressed output compared to stdlib. Negative means the output was bigger. *Loss* means the loss (or gain) in compression as a percentage difference of the input.
The `gzstd` (standard library gzip) and `gzkp` (this package gzip) only uses one CPU core. [`pgzip`](https://github.com/klauspost/pgzip), [`bgzf`](https://github.com/biogo/hts/tree/master/bgzf) uses all 4 cores. [`zstd`](https://github.com/DataDog/zstd) uses one core, and is a beast (but not Go, yet).
## Overall differences.
There appears to be a roughly 5-10% speed advantage over the standard library when comparing at similar compression levels.
The biggest difference you will see is the result of [re-balancing](https://blog.klauspost.com/rebalancing-deflate-compression-levels/) the compression levels. I wanted by library to give a smoother transition between the compression levels than the standard library.
This package attempts to provide a more smooth transition, where "1" is taking a lot of shortcuts, "5" is the reasonable trade-off and "9" is the "give me the best compression", and the values in between gives something reasonable in between. The standard library has big differences in levels 1-4, but levels 5-9 having no significant gains - often spending a lot more time than can be justified by the achieved compression.
There are links to all the test data in the [spreadsheet](https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1nuNE2nPfuINCZJRMt6wFWhKpToF95I47XjSsc-1rbPQ/edit?usp=sharing) in the top left field on each tab.
## Web Content
This test set aims to emulate typical use in a web server. The test-set is 4GB data in 53k files, and is a mixture of (mostly) HTML, JS, CSS.
Since level 1 and 9 are close to being the same code, they are quite close. But looking at the levels in-between the differences are quite big.
Looking at level 6, this package is 88% faster, but will output about 6% more data. For a web server, this means you can serve 88% more data, but have to pay for 6% more bandwidth. You can draw your own conclusions on what would be the most expensive for your case.
## Object files
This test is for typical data files stored on a server. In this case it is a collection of Go precompiled objects. They are very compressible.
The picture is similar to the web content, but with small differences since this is very compressible. Levels 2-3 offer good speed, but is sacrificing quite a bit of compression.
The standard library seems suboptimal on level 3 and 4 - offering both worse compression and speed than level 6 & 7 of this package respectively.
## Highly Compressible File
This is a JSON file with very high redundancy. The reduction starts at 95% on level 1, so in real life terms we are dealing with something like a highly redundant stream of data, etc.
It is definitely visible that we are dealing with specialized content here, so the results are very scattered. This package does not do very well at levels 1-4, but picks up significantly at level 5 and levels 7 and 8 offering great speed for the achieved compression.
So if you know you content is extremely compressible you might want to go slightly higher than the defaults. The standard library has a huge gap between levels 3 and 4 in terms of speed (2.75x slowdown), so it offers little "middle ground".
## Medium-High Compressible
This is a pretty common test corpus: [enwik9](http://mattmahoney.net/dc/textdata.html). It contains the first 10^9 bytes of the English Wikipedia dump on Mar. 3, 2006. This is a very good test of typical text based compression and more data heavy streams.
We see a similar picture here as in "Web Content". On equal levels some compression is sacrificed for more speed. Level 5 seems to be the best trade-off between speed and size, beating stdlib level 3 in both.
## Medium Compressible
I will combine two test sets, one [10GB file set](http://mattmahoney.net/dc/10gb.html) and a VM disk image (~8GB). Both contain different data types and represent a typical backup scenario.
The most notable thing is how quickly the standard library drops to very low compression speeds around level 5-6 without any big gains in compression. Since this type of data is fairly common, this does not seem like good behavior.
## Un-compressible Content
This is mainly a test of how good the algorithms are at detecting un-compressible input. The standard library only offers this feature with very conservative settings at level 1. Obviously there is no reason for the algorithms to try to compress input that cannot be compressed. The only downside is that it might skip some compressible data on false detections.
## Huffman only compression
This compression library adds a special compression level, named `HuffmanOnly`, which allows near linear time compression. This is done by completely disabling matching of previous data, and only reduce the number of bits to represent each character.
This means that often used characters, like 'e' and ' ' (space) in text use the fewest bits to represent, and rare characters like '¤' takes more bits to represent. For more information see [wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Huffman_coding) or this nice [video](https://youtu.be/ZdooBTdW5bM).
Since this type of compression has much less variance, the compression speed is mostly unaffected by the input data, and is usually more than *180MB/s* for a single core.
The downside is that the compression ratio is usually considerably worse than even the fastest conventional compression. The compression ratio can never be better than 8:1 (12.5%).
The linear time compression can be used as a "better than nothing" mode, where you cannot risk the encoder to slow down on some content. For comparison, the size of the "Twain" text is *233460 bytes* (+29% vs. level 1) and encode speed is 144MB/s (4.5x level 1). So in this case you trade a 30% size increase for a 4 times speedup.
For more information see my blog post on [Fast Linear Time Compression](http://blog.klauspost.com/constant-time-gzipzip-compression/).
This is implemented on Go 1.7 as "Huffman Only" mode, though not exposed for gzip.
