THG Home Page HDF5 and BZIP Compression


[ HDF5 Documentation ] [ HDF5 Home Page ]

We have done a performance study of using bzip2 with an HDF5 file. The study focused on the performance comparison between bzip2 and gzip. One important goal of this study was to help the HDF5 group decide whether or not HDF5 should support bzip2 compression.

The report can be found at:

   PDF Version
   HTML
Based on the report, the following can be observed:

Although bzip2 is always better than gzip in compression ratio within a few percentage points, bzip2 always takes more processing time than gzip, especially for decoding time.

Therefore, the HDF group has decided not to officially support the bzip2 library for the time being. However, we have provided an example to show how to use the bzip2 filter in a user application:

   bz_example.tar
This example was tested on Linux 2.2.18.



Last Modified: February 20, 2007