This post is about minimizing amount of disk IO and CPU overhead when reading Zip files. I recently saw an article about a new format that was faster than zip. This is quite surprising as to my mind, zip is one of the most flexible and low-overhead formats I’ve encountered. Some googling showed me that over past 11 years people have noticed that Firefox uses optimized zip files. This inspired me to document thinking behind the optimized zip format I implemented in Firefox in the pre-pandemi...
