Data compression involves reducing the size of data by way of applying a data compression technique to target data. Data compression is advantageous in certain scenarios and environments. For example, video content may be compressed so that the video data can be transmitted faster over a communications network that has a limited bandwidth.
Certain types of content are less successfully compressible than others. For example, compressing data content that is encrypted or has been previously compressed is generally not an efficient use of resources, because that data may not be compressed much further. That is, if compressing a target dataset does not result in reasonable savings, then resources utilized for compressing the dataset would be deemed wasted.
It would be very useful to accurately determine the level of savings that may be achieved via data compression before actually allocating and utilizing the respective computing resources to compress the data. If the level of data compression that is achievable is known in advance, one can more efficiently predict the amount of storage needed to store the to be compressed data and can further allocate the computing resources to compress only those data that can be more optimally compressed.