The
Lempel–Ziv–Markov chain algorithm (
LZMA) is an
algorithm used to perform
lossless data compression. It has been under development either since 1996 or 1998 and was first used in the
7z format of the 7-Zip archiver. This algorithm uses a
dictionary compression scheme somewhat similar to the
LZ77 algorithm published by
Abraham Lempel and
Jacob Ziv in 1977 and features a high compression ratio (generally higher than
bzip2) and a variable compression-dictionary size (up to 4
GB), while still maintaining decompression speed similar to other commonly used compression algorithms.