.NET Compression Libraries Benchmark
I often find myself needing a compression library in a software development project, and after a few tests with disappointing results I usually fall back to spawning 7Zip as an external process. This time however, the application specification prohibits any data written to disk, which 7Zip needs to do in order to work correctly. I needed to do everything in memory, and so I had to test some of the C# libraries available for compression as well as the different compression algorithms. Here is a full list of the tested libraries: .NET DeflateStream ICSharpCode SharpZip Zlib.NET DotNetZip Managed LZMA LZMA SDK QuickLZ Compression 101 Before I get to the results of the benchmark, I think it is important to understand the different archive formats and compression algorithms in order to compare the results with other benchmarks/and or tests. Lets get to it! A compression algorithm can be compared to a small machine that takes in some data, do some math on it and transfor