#WINRAR WINZIP ARCHIVE#
#WINRAR WINZIP RAR#
#WINRAR WINZIP SOFTWARE#
#WINRAR WINZIP ZIP#

Google Spreadsheet (editable, but need Google login).

If you're interested in crunching the multiple file compression benchmark study data yourself, I converted it to a few different formats for your convenience: But the penalty is severe, and the reward miniscule.

Is an additional two percent of compression worth taking five times longer? Is an additional four percent worth ten times longer? Under the right conditions, possibly. Note that I cherry-picked the most efficient archivers out of this data, so this represents best case performance. Look at the massive differences in time as you move toward the peak compression ratio: That's why the time scale is logarithmic in the above graph. You don't just hit the point of diminishing returns in compression, you slam into it like a brick wall. This is something I've noted before in previous compression studies. What I wanted to illustrate with this graph is that beyond about 73% compression ratio, performance falls off a cliff.

#WINRAR WINZIP ARCHIVE#

Here's a graph of compression ratio versus time, sorted by compression ratio, for all compared archive programs: The raw data on the comparison page is a little hard to parse, so I pulled the data into Excel and created some alternative views of it. People looking for good (but not ultimate) and fast compression should have a look at those two programs. Both SBC and WinRK are capable of compressing the 301 MB testset down to 82 MB in under 3 minutes. WinRAR and SBC 0.970 score very well on efficiency.

The top two spots are held by an archiver I've never heard of, SBC. Its scores of 1871 (Good) and 1983 (Best) rank third and fourth out of 200. The basic idea is a compressor X has the same efficiency as compressor Y if X can compress twice as fast as Y and resulting archive size of X is 10% larger than size of Y.Īnd sure enough, if you sort the results by efficiency, WinRAR rises directly to the top. The most efficient (read: useful) program is calculated by multiplying the compression time (in seconds) it took to produce the archive with the power of the archive size divided by the lowest measured archive size.Ģ ^ (((Size/SmallestSize)) - 1) / 0.1) * ArchiveTime The author measured both compression size and compression time to produce an efficiency metric: Consider this recent, comprehensive multiple file compression benchmark.

#WINRAR WINZIP RAR#

When I compressed all the C# code snippets, the difference was enormous:īut even in an apples-to-apples comparison, RAR offers some of the very best 'bang for the byte' of all compression algorithms. This is a big deal, because it can result in a substantially smaller archive when you're compressing a lot of files. RAR also supports solid archives, so it can exploit intra-file redundancies. If you're worried the person on the receiving end of the archive won't have a RAR client, you can create a self-extracting executable archive (or SFX) at a minimal cost of about 60 KB additional filesize. It produces much smaller archives in roughly the same time. But you should use it, because RAR, as a compression format, clobbers ZIP.

#WINRAR WINZIP ZIP#

WinRAR fully supports creating and extracting ZIP archives, so choosing WinRAR doesn't mean you'll be forced into using the RAR compression format. It's frequently updated with neat little feature bumps and useful additions two I noticed over the last year were dual-core support and real-time stats while compressing, such as estimated compression ratio and predicted completion time. And WinRAR is very much a living, breathing piece of software. There's a reason WinRAR won the best archive tool roundup at DonationCoder. In contrast, WinRAR is full-featured, powerful, and integrates seamlessly with the shell. I particularly dislike the limited 'compressed folder wizard' I get by default in XP and Vista. Sure, ZIP support is built into most operating systems, but the support is rudimentary at best.

WinRAR has become increasingly essential to my toolkit over the last year, so this month, I'm buying a WinRAR license.

#WINRAR WINZIP SOFTWARE#

When I wrote Today is 'Support Your Favorite Small Software Vendor Day', I made a commitment to spend at least $20 per month supporting my fellow independent software developers.

Winrar winzip