Snappy

Ruby wrapper for Google's fast compressor/decompressor: http://code.google.com/p/snappy/

Snappy is a compression/decompression library. It does not aim for maximum compression, or compatibility with any other compression library; 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.)

Installation

• Grab the latest Snappy build and install it on your system:
  • http://code.google.com/p/snappy/
• You may need 'Google Test' and 'Google Flags' to build Snappy:
  • http://code.google.com/p/googletest/
  • http://code.google.com/p/google-gflags/

Once you have Snappy installed on your system, you can install the gem:

gem install libsnappy

Example

compressed = Snappy.compress('string to compress')
uncompressed = Snappy.uncompress(compressed)

For benchmarks and motivation behind Snappy see:

• http://blog.sesse.net/blog/tech/2011-03-22-19-24_snappy
• http://pastebin.com/SFaNzRuf

License

(MIT License) - Copyright (c) 2011 Ilya Grigorik