Article · Wikipedia archive · Last revised Jul 26, 2026

LZRW

Lempel–Ziv Ross Williams (LZRW) refers to variants of the LZ77 lossless data compression algorithms with an emphasis on improving compression speed through the use of hash tables and other techniques. This family was explored by Ross Williams, who published a series of algorithms beginning with LZRW1 in 1991.

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Jul 26, 2026
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Lempel–Ziv Ross Williams (LZRW) refers to variants of the LZ77 lossless data compression algorithms with an emphasis on improving compression speed through the use of hash tables and other techniques. This family was explored by Ross Williams, who published a series of algorithms1 beginning with LZRW1 in 1991.

The variants are:

  • LZRW12
  • LZRW1-A
  • LZRW2
  • LZRW3
  • LZRW3-A
  • LZRW4
  • LZRW5

The LZJB algorithm used in ZFS is derived from LZRW1.

Notes

Notes

  1. Williams, Ross. LZRW1. May 16, 2005.
  2. Williams, R.N., "An Extremely Fast Ziv-Lempel Data Compression Algorithm", Data Compression Conference 1991 (DCC'91), 8–11 April 1991, Snowbird, Utah, pp.362-371