Recommendations for .NET compression library [closed]

Question

I am looking for some recommendations about compressing data in .NET, aside from using the GZipStream class.

I am looking for fast and high compression of byte arrays to be able to send them via TCP.

Answer 1

If you are compressing data, then you might look at high-density serialization, rather than compression. Something like protobuf. There are a few C# implementations here. For existing objects, protobuf-net is IMO the simplest to implement (disclosure: I'm the author - but it is free etc). You just serialize to the stream, or if you want a byte[], a separate MemoryStream.

For continuous use over a socket (rather than the discreet request/response of HTTP), I would suggest looking at the Serializer.SerializeWithLengthPrefix / Serializer.DeserializeWithLengthPrefix operations (protobuf doesn't itself include a terminator, so a length-prefix is necessary to handle separate messages).