Meta Releases OpenZL 0.3 With Decompression Speed 144% Faster Than Zstd

Written by Michael Larabel in Programming on 29 September 2026 at 12:06 PM EDT. 10 Comments
PROGRAMMING
Just shy of one year ago Meta announced OpenZL as a format-ware compression framework focused on delivering both high compression ratios and high speed compression/decompression. OpenZL has continued making more optimizations and out today is OpenZL v0.3 and advertising some huge gains over Zstandard (Zstd) that is also worked on by Meta engineers.

OpenZL 0.3 ships a major upgrade to its native LZ engine as well as a neural selector to build numeric compression graphs as needed.

The compression speed hasn't changed too much since OpenZL v0.2, but with OpenZL v0.3 the LZ engine is much faster with around 33% higher performance. At equivalent settings, OpenZL 0.3 decompression speed is around 144% faster than Zstandard. Some pretty impressive results for OpenZL v0.3:

OpenZL 0.3 benchmark comparison


The Compression Transformer in OpenZL 0.3 is for choosing the right combination of codecs for a given input. Today's release announcement notes that it compresses on average 35% better than Zstd at its highest compression level 19.

Downloads and more details on the OpenZL 0.3 release via GitHub.
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Michael Larabel is the principal author of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a focus on enriching the Linux hardware experience. Michael has written more than 20,000 articles covering the state of Linux hardware support, Linux performance, graphics drivers, and other topics. Michael is also the lead developer of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org automated benchmarking software. He can be followed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or contacted via MichaelLarabel.com.

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