
Building better compression together with DivANS - mmastrac
https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/2018/06/building-better-compression-together-with-divans/
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BlackLotus89
So up until now Dropbox used zlib compression? I would have thought that they
would use zstd or brotli for a good speed/ratio-ratio or lz4 for speed.

DivANS looks interesting/promising like a nice little kit for compression.
Doesn't seem like it's good for archiving since it doesn't seem to have
support for seek (or so it seems, would like to be proven wrong), but very
interesting nonetheless.

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eesmith
I don't know how to reconcile this post with previous posts of their's where
they talk about using brotli.
[https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/tag/brotli/](https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech/tag/brotli/)

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sanxiyn
Those posts are about static files (such as JavaScript) on dropbox.com
websites, not about files stored in Dropbox.

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eesmith
Thanks!

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phrh8
What future work can we see here? Is this sort of approach really pushing the
state of the art or is it just an attempt squeeze another few percent out of
brotli at the expense of more CPU.

My understanding is the main novel idea here is splitting compression into
independent subproblems. Is there potential for this idea to become the basis
for all new modern (lossless) codecs (e.g. redesigns of FLAC or PNG)?

