Measured - byte-exact - 2026

Pedulli vs lzop

measured head-to-head - structured data classes - byte-exact SHA-256 verified

TL;DR - honest
lzop (LZO) is the "fastest compression that still produces compressed output". Pedulli is a best-of-N racer that races xz, zstd, brotli and your data's SRD math, then keeps the smallest verified output - so it is never larger than the best standard codec (worst case +1 byte). It wins ratio outright across structured classes and ties the best codec on already-optimal data; lzop keeps an edge only on raw compression throughput. Same speed/ratio trade-off as lz4.

The measured table

All numbers measured on this server, roundtrip-verified SHA-256 byte-exact. Proofs available on request.

Input	lzop -9	Pedulli (best-of-N)	Δ
1 MiB of zeros	5,012 B	13 B	much smaller (redundant input)
JSON 31 KB	7,124 B	1,265 B	-82%
HTML 161 KB	71,168 B	38,757 B	-45.5%
Apache logs 3.5 MB	523 KB	217 KB	-58.5%
MP4 master 10 MB	10,189,316 B	9,430,108 B	-742 KB
Random bytes 1 MB	1,048,613 B (+37 B)	1,048,577 B (+1 B)	36 B less overhead

What lzop does better (honest)

Compression speed. One of the fastest published lossless compressors - suitable when you are CPU-bound at write time.
Backup-tool integration. Used in some backup presets where speed beats ratio.

What Pedulli does that lzop does not

+1 byte never-worse floor vs lzop's +37 on random data.
Best-of-N racing. Races xz, zstd, brotli and SRD math, keeps the smallest verified output - never larger than the best standard codec. Far tighter on every structured class measured.
Web service + REST API + chunked streaming.
Zero data retention. GDPR by design, EU-sovereign.

When to use which

Use lzop for high-throughput single-shot compression where minutes matter and storage is cheap. Use Pedulli when storage cost dominates and ratio compounds across a large corpus - plus the per-file +1 byte never-worse floor.

Run the free trial Pricing / API All benchmarks

More comparisons: lz4 - LZO - gzip - zstd