The Lempel–Ziv–Markov chain algorithm (LZMA) is an algorithm used to perform lossless data compression. It has been under development since either 1996 or 1998 by Igor Pavlov and was first used in the 7z format of the 7-Zip archiver. This algorithm uses a dictionary compression scheme somewhat similar to the LZ77 algorithm published by Abraham Lempel and Jacob Ziv in 1977 and features a high compression ratio (generally higher than bzip2) and a variable compression-dictionary size (up to 4 GB), while still maintaining decompression speed similar to other commonly used compression algorithms.