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For latency-sensitive operations - in particular, decompression - lz4 maintains an extreme lead in performance (at a cost of lower compression ratios). This has borne out in practice for me as well.

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Last I looked at benchmarks, only lz4 level 1 compression is faster than fastest zstd setting. At all other lz4 levels, zstd has a mode as fast but with significantly better compression.

But that is throughput. How latency (on small files/chunks) is affected I have no idea.

LZ4 makes sense when you need fast (i.e. runtime) compression; for anything compressed ahead of time and distributed to be decompressed, Zstd is probably better.

You have that backwards. LZ4 is completely about decompression speed, while zstd balances compression and decompression speed. For data that will be decompressed many times, and which decompression speed is most important, LZ4. Most other cases zstd wins

We were using modified lz4 (very much molded over our data) that was actually faster than memcpy of data that we were compressing.

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