| Scenario | Algorithm Recommendation | Why? | | :--- | :--- | :--- | | | 7z (LZMA2) | Best compression ratio. Saves disk space. CPU usage is high. | | Software Distribution | zstd | Balance of speed and ratio. Becoming the new industry standard. | | Real-time Backup | LZ4 | This is the use case. LZ4 is incredibly fast. It is designed so that disk I/O is the bottleneck, not the CPU. | | Memory Constrained | LZ4 | Uses very little memory compared to LZMA2. |
Modern 7-Zip forks integrate LZ4 to address the performance limitations of standard compression methods. LZ4 is a lossless algorithm optimized for speed, often exceeding 500 MB/s per core during compression and reaching RAM speed limits during decompression. modded 7zip for lz4