The advent of massive datasets (and the consequent design of high-performing
distributed storage systems) have reignited the interest of the scientific and
engineering community towards the design of lossless data compressors which
achieve effective compression ratio and very efficient decompression speed.
Lempel-Ziv's LZ77 algorithm is the de facto choice in this scenario because of
its decompression speed and its flexibility in trading decompression speed
versus compressed-space efficiency. Each of the existing implementations offers
a trade-off between space occupancy and decompression speed, so software
engineers have to content themselves by picking the one which comes closer to
the requirements of the application in their hands. Starting from these
premises, and for the first time in the literature, we address in this paper
the problem of trading optimally, and in a principled way, the consumption of
these two resources by introducing the Bicriteria LZ77-Parsing problem, which
formalizes in a principled way what data-compressors have traditionally
approached by means of heuristics. The goal is to determine an LZ77 parsing
which minimizes the space occupancy in bits of the compressed file, provided
that the decompression time is bounded by a fixed amount (or vice-versa). This
way, the software engineer can set its space (or time) requirements and then
derive the LZ77 parsing which optimizes the decompression speed (or the space
occupancy, respectively). We solve this problem efficiently in O(n log^2 n)
time and optimal linear space within a small, additive approximation, by
proving and deploying some specific structural properties of the weighted graph
derived from the possible LZ77-parsings of the input file. The preliminary set
of experiments shows that our novel proposal dominates all the highly
engineered competitors, hence offering a win-win situation in theory&practice
