[vlovich123]

My bad. Yes from decompression perspective you have O(1) ancillary data to initiate decompression at 1 seek point.

This is how seeking can work in encrypted data btw without the ancillary data - you just increment the IV every N bytes so there’s a guaranteed mapping for how to derive the IV for a block so you’re bounded by how much extra you need to encrypt/decrypt to do a random byte range access of the plaintext.

But none of this is unique to gzip. You can always do this for any compression algorithm provided you can snapshot the state - the state at a seek point is always going to be fairly small.

[phiresky]

I actually first thought this wasn't possible at all because I'm used to zstd which by default uses a 128MB window and I usually set it to the max (2GB window). 32kB is _really_ tiny in comparison. On the other hand though, zstd also compresses in parallel by default and has tools built in to handle these things, so seekable zstd archives are fairly common.