Zstandard, fast real-time compression algorithm increases Ubuntu installation speed by 10%

by do son · Published March 15, 2018 · Updated October 25, 2022

Debian and Ubuntu developer Julian Andres Klode said: “Canonical plans to implement Facebook’s open source compression algorithm, zstd by default in future versions of the Ubuntu Linux operating system.”

The algorithm was developed by Yann Collet at Facebook, an open source, lossless data compression algorithm designed to provide fast real-time compression and decompression speeds even faster than xz or gzip. Zstd supports up to 19 compression levels, offers 2.877 compression ratios, compression ratios up to 430 MB/s and decompression speeds up to 1110 MB/s.

Julian Andres Klode and Balint Reczey report that they have managed to increase the speed of standard 64-bit installations of Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) by 10% and the zstd configuration settings to a maximum of 19 levels. Even better, when you disable the “eatmydata” library for fsync and related packages, the installation speed is increased by approximately 40%.

Debian GNU / Linux and Ubuntu operating system’s dpkg and apt command line package management system support Facebook’s zstd compression algorithm. In addition, Canonical plans to enable it by default in future Ubuntu releases, starting with the release of Ubuntu 18.10 this fall, but the report also stated that zstd has increased the size of Ubuntu installations by approximately 6%.

Zstd support is also implemented in the upcoming Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) operating system, Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) is expected to be released on April 26, 2018. Two developers stated that their zstd implementation for dpkg and apt can support multiple frames, meaning that Debian packages will eventually be compressed and decompressed in parallel.

Source: Softpedia