The Lempel–Ziv–Markov chain algorithm (LZMA) is an
algorithm
In mathematics and computer science, an algorithm () is a finite sequence of rigorous instructions, typically used to solve a class of specific problems or to perform a computation. Algorithms are used as specifications for performing ...
used to perform
lossless data compression
Lossless compression is a class of data compression that allows the original data to be perfectly reconstructed from the compressed data with no loss of information. Lossless compression is possible because most real-world data exhibits statist ...
. It has been under development since either 1996 or 1998 by
Igor Pavlov and was first used in the
7z format of the
7-Zip
7-Zip is a free and open-source file archiver, a utility used to place groups of files within compressed containers known as "archives". It is developed by Igor Pavlov and was first released in 1999. 7-Zip has its own archive format called 7 ...
archiver. This algorithm uses a
dictionary compression scheme somewhat similar to the
LZ77
LZ77 and LZ78 are the two lossless data compression algorithms published in papers by Abraham Lempel and Jacob Ziv in 1977 and 1978.
They are also known as LZ1 and LZ2 respectively. These two algorithms form the basis for many variations including ...
algorithm published by
Abraham Lempel and
Jacob Ziv
Jacob Ziv ( he, יעקב זיו; born 1931) is an Israeli electrical engineer who, along with Abraham Lempel, developed the LZ family of lossless data compression algorithms.
Biography
Ziv was born in Tiberias, British mandate Palestine, on 27 No ...
in 1977 and features a high compression ratio (generally higher than
bzip2)
[ - LZMA Unix Port was finally replaced by xz which features better and faster compression; from here we know even LZMA Unix Port was a lot better than gzip and bzip2.] and a variable compression-dictionary size (up to 4
GB),
while still maintaining decompression speed similar to other