Open Source Summit North America 2018

There are a few libraries that are widely used along the whole software stack and has being providing good services to the OSS community for a long time, but none can claim the top spot reserved to zlib.

First released in 1995, it is responsible for providing fast and efficient data compression to the whole soft stack (i.e. Linux kernel, Apache, Firefox, Android to name a few), being patent free and with a liberal license.

The question is: could we make it any faster? Specially on mobile devices?

This talk will explain how an investigation started about one year ago targeting to accelerate zlib performance on ARM processors using SIMD techniques (i.e. NEON).

Performance gains of 1.5x to 2x in decompression were reached and this optimizations were later ported to Intel (SSE3) and is shipping in Chromium, improving the experience of over 1 billion users.