LZ4 vs TAR — Differences, File Size & When to Use Each

LZ4 vs TAR

Een uitgebreide vergelijking van LZ4 Compressed en TAR Archive — bestandsgrootte, kwaliteit, compatibiliteit en welk formaat het beste past bij jouw workflow.

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LZ4

LZ4 Compressed

Archives & Compressed

LZ4 is an extremely fast lossless compression algorithm focused on speed over compression ratio. It can compress at over 500 MB/s per core and decompress at multiple GB/s, making it the standard choice for real-time and in-memory compression.

Over LZ4-bestanden

TAR

TAR Archive

Archives & Compressed

TAR is a Unix archive format that bundles files together without compression. It is commonly combined with gzip or bzip2 for compressed archives and is the standard for Linux software distribution.

Over TAR-bestanden

Vergelijking van sterke punten

LZ4 Sterke punten

Decompression speed — approaches memcpy throughput.
Very fast compression — can keep up with SSD write speeds.
Stable format — reference implementation unchanged for years.
Widely deployed in databases, filesystems, and kernels.
BSD-licensed library.

TAR Sterke punten

Streamable — you can tar files straight to a network pipe, no seek needed.
Preserves Unix permissions, ownership, symbolic links, and timestamps.
Universally supported on Unix-like systems.
Simple format — the GNU tar source has been stable for decades.
No compression overhead — pair with gzip/xz/zstd as needed.

Beperkingen

LZ4 Beperkingen

Compression ratio lags gzip by 20-30%.
Not designed for long-term archival where ratio matters.
Older than zstd, which beats LZ4 at comparable speed at slightly better ratio.
Rare as a user-facing format — lives mostly inside databases and filesystems.

TAR Beperkingen

No built-in compression — plain .tar files are the same size as their contents.
No random access — reading one file requires scanning from the start.
Windows tooling is second-class — PowerShell only added native tar in 2018.
Multiple incompatible header variants (v7, ustar, POSIX, GNU) over the years.

Technische specificaties

Specificatie	LZ4	TAR
MIME type	application/x-lz4	application/x-tar
Extensions	.lz4	—
Algorithm	LZ77 variant with fast byte-level parsing	—
License	BSD 2-Clause (library), GPL v2 (CLI)	—
Typical integrations	Linux kernel, ZFS, Kafka, RocksDB, Cassandra	—
Extension	—	.tar
Block size	—	512 bytes (traditional)
Header variants	—	v7, ustar, POSIX.1-2001 (pax), GNU
Max filename length	—	100 bytes (v7); unlimited (pax extended headers)

Typische bestandsgroottes

LZ4

Text file 40-60% of original
Already-compressed data (JPEG, MP4) 99%+ (no gain)
Database page (typical) 55-70% of original

TAR

1 MB of source files (uncompressed .tar) ~1 MB
Same files as .tar.gz 150-400 KB
Linux kernel source (.tar.xz) ~120 MB

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Veelgestelde vragen

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