[Zlib-devel] Plans for zlib 1.2.5

[Mark Adler]

On Feb 22, 2010, at 5:07 AM, Vincent Torri wrote:
>>> Yes, there are ways to make compression better by about 2% to 10% with a much slower but more aggressive deflator.  I will consider that for a version after 1.2.5.
> 
> on the other hand, please keep decompression fast and with a low memory footprint. We use zlib for those 2 features (especially on embedded).

Vincent,

Decompression will remain fast and low memory.  Improvements in compression ratios result in improvements in decompression speed.  For example a 4% improvement in the compressed size will, to first order, result in a 4% reduction in decompression time for that data.

By the way, in case you don't already take advantage of this, if you do decompression in a single call of inflate (which requires knowing the size of the decompressed data a priori), then inflate will not allocate a 32K window buffer, significantly reducing its memory usage.

Mark