This is a patched version of zlib modified to use Pentium-optimized assembly code in the deflation algorithm. The files changed/added by this patch are: README.586 match.S The effectiveness of these modifications is a bit marginal, as the program's bottleneck seems to be mostly L1-cache contention, for which there is no real way to work around without rewriting the basic algorithm. The speedup on average is around 5-10% (which is generally less than the amount of variance between subsequent executions). However, when used at level 9 compression, the cache contention can drop enough for the assembly version to achieve 10-20% speedup (and sometimes more, depending on the amount of overall redundancy in the files). Even here, though, cache contention can still be the limiting factor, depending on the nature of the program using the zlib library. This may also mean that better improvements will be seen on a Pentium with MMX, which suffers much less from L1-cache contention, but I have not yet verified this. Note that this code has been tailored for the Pentium in particular, and will not perform well on the Pentium Pro (due to the use of a partial register in the inner loop). If you are using an assembler other than GNU as, you will have to translate match.S to use your assembler's syntax. (Have fun.) Brian Raiter breadbox@muppetlabs.com April, 1998 Added for zlib 1.1.3: The patches come from http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/software/assembly.html To compile zlib with this asm file, copy match.S to the zlib directory then do: CFLAGS="-O3 -DASMV" ./configure make OBJA=match.o