A computer program product for data compression is provided. The computer program product includes a computer readable storage medium having program instructions embodied therewith. The program instructions are readable and executable by a processing circuit to cause the processing circuit to execute software compression for first requests for data compression that have respective sizes below a predefined threshold, forward second requests for data compression having respective sizes above the predefined threshold to a hardware accelerator and maintain a persistence of a compression dictionary used for executing the second requests across executions of the first and second requests.