[CoolGuySteve]

I use LZ4 (with "best" compression) for packet captures and replay with great results.

I get about a 37% compression ratio with extremely fast decoding, like 10 million packets per second off an SSD.

It was better than snappy, gzip, and bz2 for the trade-off of compression time, decompression time and file size.

As for protobuf: flatbuffers, capn proto, HDF5, and plain C structs all deliver much, much faster decoding time. It's really not the best answer for any serialization at this point but it's still inexplicably popular.