# Laminar — How Laminar compresses agent traces by 20x

- Company: Laminar (laminar.sh)
- Announced: 2026-05-19
- Category: not stated
- Coverage: not counted
- Announcement: no
- Group: routine
- Source: https://laminar.sh/blog/laminar-20x-agent-trace-compression
- Record: https://forck.live/items/16850-how-laminar-compresses-agent-traces-by-20x
- Subject: flow / agent observability

Laminar implemented trace deduplication: instead of storing every LLM call's full message history (which grows quadratically with turn count), the system hashes each message and stores unique messages only once per trace, storing a compact array of hashes in spans. At query time, the original input array is reconstructed byte-identically via the SQL engine. On realistic long-running agents the approach reduces data from 5× to 10×, and on a 50-turn coding agent with stable system prompt and long tool outputs it approaches 50×.

## Evidence

Verbatim from https://laminar.sh/blog/laminar-20x-agent-trace-compression:

> Our approach is to hash every message (canonical JSON, so two payloads differing only in object field order collapse to the same hash) and store each unique message once per trace. The span instead stores a compact array of 32-byte hashes.

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