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Benchmarks
Settings
This benchmark
compares compression ratio and
speed archiving and extracting files of
multiple types (divided in two sets, see below) using various archive
types:
- ZIP,
widely used archive format, supported for
extraction and often creation by most of file and archive manager
utilities.
- RAR,
widespread archive format providing better
compression that ZIP and other advanced features. Unlike ZIP it is
based on a proprietary algorithm, so no third part software can create
RAR files, but due to its huge popularity almost all archive managers
supports RAR extraction.
- ZIPX, a
format introduced a few years ago by
WinZip, partially based on ZIP with use of better compression
algorithms to provide higher compression ratio.
- ARC, a
quite new Open Source archive format
introduced by FreeArc (and supported as experimental format both in
creation and extraction by PeaZip), written ground up for high
compression ratio and advanced features like strong encryption and
error recovery.
- 7Z, a
popular Open Source archive format
introduced by 7-Zip, providing higher compression ratio than RAR, and
now supported by many archive managers.
Benchmarks are done
using WinZip , WinRar, IZArc, and
PeaZip.
7-Zip and FreeArc are not
included in this
benchmark since used as backend binaries in PeaZip, so benchmark
results for
those utilities would be closely similar to results using PeaZip.
Programs were tested using default,
out-of-the-box compression settings for the selected format, in all
cases the compression level was labelled as "normal", excluding for
IZArc where "Maximal" compression level was the default.
After each compression test the output archive was extracted in order
to test it was identical to input data.
Windows
7 64 bit operating system, 5400rpm HD, NTFS filesystem, cached data
(discard the first instance of the test in order to have the data
cached in RAM and eliminate as possible input reading operation from
the disk), 6GB RAM DDR3 1066 MHz SDRAM, CPU Intel Core i7 740QM (4
physcal cores with
Hyper-threading for a total of 8 logical cores).
Software
PeaZip
3.8 (3.8.1 for ZIPX extraction) 64 bit; WinRar 4.01 64 bit ; WinZip
15.0, IZArc 4.1.6.
 
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Set 1
Composition
Set 1 is composed by various standard test files: Calgary and
Canterbury corpora, enwik8,
Generic
compression benchmark, Waterloo sets,
containing 134 MB (141506533 B) of data in 71 files and 10 folders.
It contains well known reference files widely used for compression
benchmarks, representative of different data structures.
Scope
This is
a
classic compression benchmark, meant to synthetically evaluate
how fast and efficient can be the compression and extraction of files
representing various typical data structures.
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Set 2
Composition
Set 2 is composed by PortableApps.com
Suite Light 1.6.1, installed, containing 125 MB (131464076 bytes)
of data in 2277 files and 343 folders.
This set contains various applications for Win32, most common file
types
are: executables, resource files (icons, graphic), and various types of
documentation files; applications are from different developers, so
different strategies for
space optimization and for resource bundling are used.
Scope
This benchmark is meant to tests the ability to efficiently backup and
restore a
complex nested structure populated by thousands files.
Also, it evaluates the
efficiency (in terms of speed and achiveable compression ratio) in
dealing with already partially optimized executables,
documentation and resources.
In this test, the ability of efficiently handling I/O is fundamental
for achieving
good speed results, both for compression and extraction. |
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