Zstandard
No written verdict yet. Here is what commenters said.
19recommend
0warn against
Nov 12, 2025first mention
Oct 25, 2026latest mention
Why people recommend it
“Zstandard is an awesome piece of technology.”
Show 3 more
“Zstd has a seekable format for frames”
“Given how fast zstd can decompress”
“Zstd is widely supported in browsers”
Caveats and dissent
Often compared with
Who recommends it in their own words
Threads where it came up
- We could save petabytes of cache storage with Zstandard and Pingora 6 mentions
- An Ode to Bzip 6 mentions
- bzip3 4 mentions
- ISO PDF spec is getting Brotli – ~20 % smaller documents with no quality loss 4 mentions
- SQLite Is a Library of Congress Recommended Storage Format 3 mentions
- Hellishly Slow Level 13 Deflate Compression 2 mentions
Also written as Zstandard, Zstd, ZSTD. Data: zstandard.json. Quotes are verbatim; the verdict and theme labels are written by a model from these comments, and every clause links to its sources.
All comments 40
“Zstd compression.”
> knowing that it indirectly supports company > I totally get that by using zstd I'm not directly supporting these things. I'm not supporting Facebook by using a library that's freely available on the public internet and hosted by others. I'm not out there saying its worth the genocide. I actively try and avoid giving Facebook any amount of actual value from me and the things I touch. If you can point to how me using
“Orders faster than zstd.”
“If I need speed then zstd wins.”
“implement a complete zstd decoder”
“zstd automatically learns the most efficient dictionary it can within a few kilobytes.”
“It's 128 MiB by default in the command line decompressor”
“zstd is the go-to compression format these days”
“That always seemed annoying to me.”
“the official lib at least uses 1-22”
“Zstandard is an awesome piece of technology.”
Also external dictionaries https://nigeltao.github.io/blog/2022/zstandard-part-7-dictionaries.html
“Zstd has a seekable format for frames”
“Given how fast zstd can decompress”
“Zstd is widely supported in browsers”
“to compress long strings using a trained ZSTD dictionary”
“compress it with ZSTD, it typically will be better”
“embedding the zstd decompressor blew up the binary”
“Zstd already follows the pareto line very closely”
“gzip is competitive with zstd”
“Even compression level 1 or 2 is pretty good.”
“10% faster compression speed and 70% faster decompression speed compared to Zstandard level 1”
“zstd - 28mb”
“practical tools that intend to balance compression ratio with limitation on CPU speed / memory, like zstd”
“switching the compression from Deflate to Zstandard”
I love zstd as the next guy and I do use zstd solo for the most part. I had a talk on it few years back too (incl. using the lib directly from Java, massively decreasing log storage, and so on). Why use it w/ 7-zip though. 7-zip archives multiple files/directories and supports encryption. It has the UI too.. On Windows there is NanaZip that's available in the microsoft store which has been graced by corporate for use
I love using zstd, it's so fast to decompress. I especially like that the JavaScript decoder is 8kb and still really fast. Though the 25kb wasm decoders are about twice as fast. What are the advantages or reasons to use zstd in a 7z container versus just .zst?
“Personally I use only zstd with .7z”
“compressed those with zstd and decompressed them via wasm on every load”
They moved on to Courgette, then to Zucchini: https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/src/+/HEAD/components/zucchini/ These are optimized for compiled code though.
“I wonder how it compares to e.g. the library that Chrome uses”
“While it might not compress as small, it decompresses way faster”
“Of course for other kinds of files, zstd wins”
“zstd is pretty much Pareto optimal at all settings when looking at size vs. decompression speed”
“So Pareto by design, just not using that name”
“And zstd is multi threaded from the beginning.”
“There was an analysis which argued that zstd is pareto optimal.”
lz4 can still be the right choice when decompression speed matters. It's almost twice as fast at decompression with similar compression ratios to zstd's fast setting. https://github.com/facebook/zstd?tab=readme-ov-file#benchmarks
“while Zstd compresses 15 percent smaller but takes 3.4 milliseconds to answer”
“ZSTD (attempting a rewrite in Rust)”