Faster GZIP compression on the JVM

JVM compression benchmarks abound. Snappy and other compression libraries are often tagged as the go-to as they are quite a lot faster.

However, GZIP and the deflate algorithm is a very widely supported format with reasonably good performance. What if I told you you could get double the speed from gzip on Java?

Cloudflare have in fact done some excellent work tuning the open source zlib implementation, however this code is not available on the JVM, as it is a C library. The zlib implementation provided by Java is an older version, and overriding with LD_LIBRARY_PATH etc is not possible as the library is bundled.

Until now ..

I have packaged together some of the existing C and Java JNI code along with a few modifications, which allows you to call directly to an imported zlib library of your choosing! Include Cloudflare library for example and you will get more than 2x performance.

Benchmark results are excellent:
https://github.com/jasonk000/fastzlib

Benchmark                                Mode  Cnt   Score   Error  Units
BenchmarkCompressors.compressCloudflare  thrpt    5  43.760 ± 5.566  ops/s
BenchmarkCompressors.compressJvm         thrpt    5  19.533 ± 2.931  ops/s