A comparison of compression formats for storing JSON

Happy new year, everyone!

I've blogged about different aspects of a (not so?) little project of mine several times now (exhibits A, B, C, D, and finally E - even if I didn't know it at the time), but it appears that I end up running into all sorts of interesting problems that I invent cool solutions for. I also find myself doing a bunch of research that I'm surprised nobody's compiled into a single place yet - as is the case in this blog post. (Also, Happy 2018 everyone! First post of the year :D)

I've been refactoring the subsystem that saves a considerable amount of JSON data to a bunch of different files on disk. Obviously, I'm interested in minimising the amount of space this JSON data takes up on disk. As this saving process happens in the background on a separate thread, I'm not too concerned about performance - other than it can't be too slow. With this in mind, I've found myself testing a bunch of different compression algorithms. Let's introduce our test data:

1. A 17MiB card game dataset, as a single minified JSON file
2. A 40KiB 'live' specimen chunk's data, saved as a single minified JSON file.

I can't remember which card game the first dataset is from, but I do know that I found it in the awesome JSON datasets list. Next up, here's our cast of compression algorithms we'll be testing:

1. The venerable GZip
2. BZip2 - Apparently GZIP, but smaller and slightly more computationally expensive
3. XZ (the newer child of LZMA2)
4. 7zip
5. Google's Brotli

A colourful cast, to be sure! Let's run them through their paces - starting with the card game dataset. Here are the results I observe with each set to their default settings:

Format	Size
Uncompressed	17M
gzip	2.4M
bzip2	1.6M
xz	1.3M
7zip	1.4M
brotli	1.3M

Very interesting. It looks like xz and brotli are tied in first place - though I observed that brotli took ages in comparison to all the other algorithms I tested - and upon closer inspection xz beat it by 17.3KiB. Numbers are all very well, but to really see what's going on here, let's plot it on a graph:

That's better! I can actually make some comparisons now. From this graph we can observe that gzip is the worst of the lot, followed by bzip2. 7zip is surprisingly in third place, but then again it is designed for multiple files, whereas the rest of them are designed for a single stream of data. In second place is the terribly slow brotli, and finally in first place is xz.

Hrm - very interesting. How do our algorithms measure up when confronted a smaller load though? Here are the results for the sample chunk data:

Format	Size
Uncompressed	40K
gzip	5.4K
bzip2	4.3K
xz	4.6K
7zip	4.9K
Brotli	4.6K

Interesting results, to be sure, but I can't discern much from that. Let's plot a graph:

Very interesting. With smaller loads, it appears that bzip2 performs much better with smaller loads than any other algorithm. While gzip is still the worst performing algorithm, while xz and brotli, surprisingly, performed much worse than bzip2.

To that end, I'm think I'm going to be choosing bzip2 as my compression of choice for this job, as it produces the best results for the type of work I'm going to be doing.

I'm really surprised about brotli though, actually. I had high hopes for it, considering it's a new algorithm invented by Google. They claimed that it would provide xz-like compression with gzip-like speeds - but from what I'm seeing, it does anything but.

Sources and Further Reading

• Brotli.NET