LZMA is a data compression algorithm, used in the 7z format of the 7-Zip archiver. It uses a dictionary compression scheme somewhat similar to LZW and features a high compression ratio (generally higher than Bzip2) and a variable compression-dictionary size (up to 4 GB).
The reference implementation, which is available under the GNU LGPL license, has the following properties:
- Compression speed: approximately 1 MBytes per second on a 2 GHz CPU
- Decompression speed: between 10 and 20 MBytes second on a 2 GHz CPU
- Support for multi-threading and for the Pentium 4 microprocessor's hyper-threading feature