s2

S2 Compression

S2 is an extension of Snappy.

S2 is aimed for high throughput, which is why it features concurrent compression for bigger payloads.

Decoding is compatible with Snappy compressed content, but content compressed with S2 cannot be decompressed by Snappy. This means that S2 can seamlessly replace Snappy without converting compressed content.

S2 is designed to have high throughput on content that cannot be compressed. This is important so you don't have to worry about spending CPU cycles on already compressed data.

Benefits over Snappy

• Better compression
• Concurrent stream compression
• Faster decompression
• Ability to quickly skip forward in compressed stream
• Compatible with Snappy compressed content
• Offers alternative, more efficient, but slightly slower compression mode.
• Smaller block size overhead on incompressible blocks.
• Block concatenation
• Automatic stream size padding.

Drawbacks over Snappy

• Not optimized for 32 bit systems.
• No AMD64 assembler implementation yet, meaning slightly slower compression speed on 1 core CPU.
• Uses slightly more memory due to larger blocks and concurrency (configurable).

Usage

Installation: go get -u github.com/klauspost/compress/s2

Full package documentation:

Usage is similar to Snappy.

func EncodeStream(src io.Reader, dst io.Writer) error        
    enc := s2.NewWriter(dst)
    _, err := io.Copy(enc, src)
    if err != nil {
        enc.Close()
        return err
    }
    return enc.Close() 
}

You should always call enc.Close(), otherwise you will leak resources and your encode will be incomplete, as with Snappy.

For the best throughput, you should attempt to reuse the Writer using the Reset() method.

The Writer in S2 is always buffered, therefore NewBufferedWriter in Snappy can be replaced with NewWriter in S2.

func DecodeStream(src io.Reader, dst io.Writer) error        
    dec := s2.NewReader(src)
    _, err := io.Copy(dst, dec)
    return err
}

Similar to the Writer, a Reader can be reused using the Reset method.

For smaller data blocks, there is also a non-streaming interface: Encode(), EncodeBetter() and Decode(). Do however note that these functions (similar to Snappy) does not provide validation of data, so data corruption may be undetected. Stream encoding provides CRC checks of data.

Commandline tools

Some very simply commandline tools are provided; s2c for compression and s2d for decompression.

Binaries can be downloaded on the Releases Page.

Installing then requires Go to be installed. To install them, use:

go install github.com/klauspost/compress/s2/cmd/s2c && go install github.com/klauspost/compress/s2/cmd/s2d

To build binaries to the current folder use:

go build github.com/klauspost/compress/s2/cmd/s2c && go build github.com/klauspost/compress/s2/cmd/s2d

s2c

Usage: s2c [options] file1 file2

Compresses all files supplied as input separately.
Output files are written as 'filename.ext.s2'.
By default output files will be overwritten.
Use - as the only file name to read from stdin and write to stdout.

Wildcards are accepted: testdir/*.txt will compress all files in testdir ending with .txt
Directories can be wildcards as well. testdir/*/*.txt will match testdir/subdir/b.txt

Options:
  -bench int
    	Run benchmark n times. No output will be written
  -blocksize string
    	Max  block size. Examples: 64K, 256K, 1M, 4M. Must be power of two and <= 4MB (default "1M")
  -c	Write all output to stdout. Multiple input files will be concatenated
  -cpu int
    	Compress using this amount of threads (default 12)
  -faster
    	Compress faster, but with a minor compression loss
  -help
    	Display help
  -pad string
    	Pad size to a multiple of this value, Examples: 500, 64K, 256K, 1M, 4M, etc (default "1")
  -q	Don't write any output to terminal, except errors
  -rm
    	Delete source file(s) after successful compression
  -safe
    	Do not overwrite output files

s2d

Usage: s2d [options] file1 file2

Decompresses all files supplied as input. Input files must end with '.s2' or '.snappy'.
Output file names have the extension removed. By default output files will be overwritten.
Use - as the only file name to read from stdin and write to stdout.

Wildcards are accepted: testdir/*.txt will compress all files in testdir ending with .txt
Directories can be wildcards as well. testdir/*/*.txt will match testdir/subdir/b.txt

Options:
  -bench int
    	Run benchmark n times. No output will be written
  -c	Write all output to stdout. Multiple input files will be concatenated
  -help
    	Display help
  -q	Don't write any output to terminal, except errors
  -rm
    	Delete source file(s) after successful decompression
  -safe
    	Do not overwrite output files

Performance

This section will focus on comparisons to Snappy. This package is solely aimed at replacing Snappy as a high speed compression package. If you are mainly looking for better compression zstandard gives better compression, but typically at speeds slightly below "better" mode in this package.

Compression is increased compared to Snappy, mostly around 5-20% and the throughput is typically 25-40% increased (single threaded) compared to the non-assembly Go implementation.

A "better" compression mode is also available. This allows to trade a bit of speed for a minor compression gain. The content compressed in this mode is fully compatible with the standard decoder.

Snappy vs S2 compression speed on 6 core (12 thread) computer, using all threads and a single thread:

Legend

• S2 speed: Speed of S2 compared to Snappy, using 6 cores and 1 core.
• S2 throughput: Throughput of S2 in MB/s.
• S2 % smaller: How many percent of the Snappy output size is S2 better.
• S2 decomp: Decompression speed of S2 compared to Snappy and absolute speed.
• S2 "better": Speed when enabling "better" compression mode in S2 compared to Snappy.
• "better" throughput: Speed when enabling "better" compression mode in S2 compared to Snappy.
• "better" % smaller: How many percent of the Snappy output size is S2 better when using "better" compression.
• "better" decomp: Decompression speed of S2 "better" mode compared to Snappy and absolute speed.

There is a good speedup across the board when using a single thread and a significant speedup when using multiple threads.

Machine generated data gets by far the biggest compression boost, with size being being reduced by up to 45% of Snappy size.

The "better" compression mode sees a good improvement in all cases, but usually at a performance cost.

We only compare to the non-assembly AMD64 version of Snappy, since S2 does not have an assembly implementation yet. While this may seem to favour S2 on this platform, it is reasonable to assume that an S2 assembly implementation will gain the same speed. Therefore comparing to the non-assembly version gives the best apples-to-apples comparison.

Concurrent Stream Compression

Streams are concurrently compressed. The stream will be distributed among all available CPU cores for the best possible throughput.

Snappy vs S2 compression speed on 6 core (12 thread) computer:

Incompressible content (sharnd.out.2gb, 2GB random data) sees the smallest speedup. This is likely dominated by synchronization overhead, which is confirmed by the fact that single threaded performance is higher (see above).

Decompression

While the decompression code hasn't changed, there is a significant speedup in decompression speed. S2 prefers longer matches and will typically only find matches that are 6 bytes or longer. While this reduces compression a bit, it improves decompression speed.

The "better" compression mode will actively look for shorter matches, which is why it has a decompression speed quite similar to Snappy.

Single goroutine decompression speed. No assembly:

Single goroutine decompression speed. With AMD64 assembly:

Even though S2 typically compresses better than Snappy, decompression speed is always better.

Block compression

When compressing blocks no concurrent compression is performed just as Snappy. This is because blocks are for smaller payloads and generally will not benefit from concurrent compression.

Benchmarking single block performance is subject to a lot more variation since it only tests a limited number of file patterns. So individual benchmarks should only be seen as a guideline and the overall picture is more important.

An important change is that incompressible blocks will not be more than at most 10 bytes bigger than the input. In rare, worst case scenario Snappy blocks could be significantly bigger than the input.

Standard compression

In almost all cases there is a size improvement and decompression speed is better, except 1 case.

Except for the PDF and JPEG (mostly incompressible content), the speed is better than the pure Go Snappy. However, looking at the absolute numbers, these cases are still above 4GB/s.

The worst case compression speed of Snappy (plrabn12.txt and asyoulik.txt) is significantly improved.

Better compression

Except for the mostly incompressible JPEG image compression is better and usually in the double digits in terms of percentage reduction over Snappy.

The PDF sample shows a significant slowdown compared to Snappy, as this mode tries harder to compress the data.

Concatenating blocks and streams.

Concatenating streams will concatenate the output of both without recompressing them. While this is inefficient in terms of compression it might be usable in certain scenarios. The 10 byte 'stream identifier' of the second stream can optionally be stripped, but it is not a requirement.

Blocks can be concatenated using the ConcatBlocks function.

Snappy blocks/streams can safely be concatenated with S2 blocks and streams.

Format Extensions

• Frame Stream identifier changed from sNaPpY to S2sTwO.
• Framed compressed blocks can be up to 4MB (up from 64KB).
• Compressed blocks can have an offset of 0, which indicates to repeat the last seen offset.

Repeat offsets must be encoded as a 2.2.1. Copy with 1-byte offset (01), where the offset is 0.

The length is specified by reading the 3-bit length specified in the tag and decode using this table:

This allows any repeat offset + length to be represented by 2 to 5 bytes.

Lengths are stored as little endian values.

The first copy of a block cannot be a repeat offset and the offset is not carried across blocks in streams.

Default streaming block size is 1MB.

LICENSE

This code is based on the Snappy-Go implementation.

Use of this source code is governed by a BSD-style license that can be found in the LICENSE file.