Lzop reduces the size of the named files. Whenever possible, each
file is compressed into one with the extension .lzo, while keeping the same ownership
modes, access and modification times.
Lzop uses the *LZO data compression library* for compression services. The amount of
compression obtained depends on the size of the input and the distribution of common
substrings.
Typically, text such as source code or English is compressed into 40-50% of the original
size, and large files usually compress much better than small ones. Compression and
decompression speed is generally much faster than that achieved by GZip, but compression
ratio is worse.