Developed by Yann Collet at Facebook, zstd is an open-source lossless data compression algorithm designed to offer fast real-time compression and decompression speeds, even faster than xz or gzip. Zstd supports up to 19 compression levels, offering a 2.877 compression ratio with up to 430 MB/s compression and 1110 MB/s decompression speeds.
Julian Andres Klode and Balint Reczey report that they managed to increase the speed of a standard Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) 64-bit installation by about 10 percent with a zstd configuration set at max level 19. Even better, the install speed was increased by about 40 percent when the “eatmydata” library designed to disable fsync and related packages was involved.
Support for Facebook’s zstd compression algorithm was implemented in the dpkg and apt command-line package management systems for Debian GNU/Linux and Ubuntu operating systems. Also, Canonical now plans to enable it by default in future Ubuntu releases, starting with Ubuntu 18.10 this fall, even if zstd is reportedly increasing the installation size by about 6 percent.
Zstd support will also be available in the forthcoming Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (Bionic Beaver) operating system, due for release next month on April 26, 2018. The two developers said that their zstd implementations for dpkg and apt are capable of supporting multiple frames, which means that Debian packages will be eventually compressed and decompressed in parallel.
Source: http://news.softpedia.com/news/new-ubuntu-installs-could-be-speed-up-by-10-with-the-zstd-compression-algorithm-520177.shtml
Submitted by :Arnfried Walbrecht
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