Abstract
Nearly all molecular sequence databases currently use gzip for data compression. Ongoing rapid accumulation of stored data calls for more efficient compression tool. We systematically benchmarked the available compressors on representative DNA, RNA and Protein datasets. We tested specialized sequence compressors 2bit, BLAST, DNA-COMPACT, DELIMINATE, Leon, MFCompress, NAF, UHT and XM, and general-purpose compressors brotli, bzip2, gzip, lz4, lzop, lzturbo, pbzip2, pigz, snzip, xz, zpaq and zstd. Overall, NAF and zstd performed well in terms of transfer/decompression speed. However, checking benchmark results is necessary when choosing compressor for specific data type and application. Benchmark results database is available at: http://kirr.dyndns.org/sequence-compression-benchmark/.
