Snappy does not aim compatibility with any other compression library or for maximum compression; instead, it aims for very high speeds and reasonable compression.
For instance, compared to the fastest mode of zlib, Snappy is an order of magnitude faster for most inputs, but the resulting compressed files are anywhere from 20% to 100% bigger.
On a single core of a Core i7 processor in 64-bit mode, Snappy compresses at about 250 MB/sec or more and decompresses at about 500 MB/sec or more.
Snappy is widely used inside Google, in everything from BigTable and MapReduce to our internal RPC systems. (Snappy has previously been referred to as “Zippy” in some presentations and the likes.)
Here are some key features of "Snappy":
· Fast: Compression speeds at 250 MB/sec and beyond, with no assembler code. See "Performance" below.
· Stable: Over the last few years, Snappy has compressed and decompressed petabytes of data in Google`s production environment. The Snappy bitstream format is stable and will not change between versions.
· Robust: The Snappy decompressor is designed not to crash in the face of corrupted or malicious input.
· Free and open source software: Snappy is licensed under the Apache license, version 2.0. For more information, see the included COPYING file.
