The Test
We use xz -9 as our baseline — it's widely regarded as the strongest general-purpose compressor available and the standard benchmark for maximum compression.
We took a 10.4MB ZooKeeper log file — 74,380 lines of Apache ZooKeeper coordination service output — and ran it through xz at maximum compression, then through Smallest.zip.
Results
| Compressor | Size | vs xz -9 |
|---|---|---|
| xz -9 | 344 KB | baseline |
| Smallest.zip | 63 KB | -81.6% |
Smallest.zip compresses the ZooKeeper log to 63KB — that's 99.4% smaller than the original 10.4MB file, and 81.6% smaller than xz at maximum compression.
Key Takeaways
ZooKeeper logs are generated by the distributed coordination service that underpins Kafka, Hadoop, and many other distributed systems. They contain session events, leader elections, connection state changes, and quorum activity — highly repetitive structured data that Smallest.zip excels at compressing.
xz already does well here, bringing 10.4MB down to 344KB. Smallest.zip goes 5.5x further, producing output that fits in just 63KB. That's a 165:1 compression ratio from the original file.
For teams running ZooKeeper clusters across multiple nodes, log volume scales quickly. Compressing with Smallest.zip means storing 63KB instead of 344KB per 10MB of logs — a significant reduction that compounds across clusters and retention windows.
Try It Yourself
Upload your own files at smallest.zip and see the difference. Every account starts with free credits.