Jon, you're missing the point.
The problem with zlib isn't that it doesn't compress well. It's that it's
too _SLOW_.
..and secondly, there's no way you'll find a compressor that comes even
close to being twice as good. 10% better yes - but then generally much
MUCH slower.
Take a look at that web page you quote, and then sort things by
decompression speed. THAT is the issue.
And no, LZO isn't even on that list. I haven't tested it, but looking at
the code, I do think LZO can be fast exactly because it seems to be
byte-based rather than bit-based, so I'd not be surprised if the claims
for its uncompression speed are true.
The constant bit-shifting/masking/extraction kills zlib performance (and
please realize that zlib is at the TOP of the list when looking at the
thing you pointed to - that silly site seems to not care about compressor
speed at all, _only_ about size). So "kills" is a relative measure, but
really - we're looking for _faster_ algorithms, not slower ones!
Linus
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