*************** Recent comparison of compression programmes *************
Well, SEA was kind enough to send me a copy of their ARC+Plus
programme to test against other compression programmes, and I felt
that I should post the results. As a preliminary statement, their
manual and package is nice, but their programme just doesn't hold
water -- in terms of speed at least.
Also, now that PKZip 1.93a and ARJ 2.22 are supposedly out, could
someone direct me (via e-mail) to an ftp'able location? Thanks!
Packing Test for Pak/PKArc/PKZip/Zoo/LHArc/Hyper/ARJ/ARC
--------------------------------------------------------
The files used in the test are given below, and is the entire
distribution of the terminal emulation programme, QVT 3.74. Here, A
denotes an ASCII file, B is a binary file. The first two timing columns
given are for compression and decompression on a Zenith 151 running a V20
chip/8087 at 4.77 MHz on a 20Mb fully compressed harddisk, the third is the
compress time for a 12 MHz 80286 clone on a 40Mb fully compressed harddisk.
Your times may vary.
DEFAULT VT 3159 A
QVT HLP 17386 A
QVT_BBS EXE 169929 B
QVT_KB MAP 2219 A
READ ME 12444 A
RELNOTES 374 20342 A
------
225479
Compression Tool Extension Time Taken Final Size % Compression
---------------- --------- ---------------- ---------- -------------
PKArc 3.61 ARC 0:43 0:36 7.6 146,507 35.0%
Zoo 2.01 ZOO 1:41 1:05 18.1 147,819 34.4%
Zoo 2.10 ZOO 4:03 1:26 37.5 148,250 34.3%
tar/compress (16 bit) xxx 2:00 1:29 150,157 33.4%
cpio/compress ( " ) xxx 2:26 149,927 33.5%
SEA ARC 6.02 ARC 1:54 1:09 17.1 152,916 32.2%
LArc 3.33 LZS 3:05 123,363 45.3%
PKZip 1.10 ZIP 1:44 0:30 16.6 109,335 51.5%
Pak 2.51 PAK/ARC/ZIP 2:35 0:55 26.3 109,019 51.7%
Hyper 2.50 HYP 2:57 2:24 23.6 109,771 51.3%
SEA ARC 7.12 ARC 4:29 2:19 37.7 108,550 51.9%
LHArc 2.13 LZH 3:07 0:51 26.1 104,488 53.7%
ARJ 1.10 ARJ 5:28 104,634 53.6%
Zoo 2.10 (high comp) ZOO 7:34 1:20 63.3 104,804 53.5%
ARJ 2.10 ARJ 2:41 1:01 24.0 102,692 54.5%
ARJ 2.20 ARJ 2:48 1:00 24.5 102,687 54.5%
There are now essentially five groupings of archivers with the
fast release of ARJ 2.10. Best compression/time combination yet. Very
impressive, especially with a 50% improvement in compression speeds over
the previous (1.xx) release. Now, we will have to see if LHArc or PKZip
can catch up on its next release -- rumour has a new ZIP 2.0 coming out
sometime. Pak and Hyper are out of it, unless a dramatic speed improvement
can be realized. I do not expect this. SEA's ARC 6.02 is essentially
useless compared to the others -- the old ZOO has better compression/times!
Courtesy of SEA, I have been able to test ARC 7.12 (also known as
ARC+Plus with the full-screen user interface). I didn't try the full
screen interface -- I use these tools purely from the command line. ARC
7.12 also has a very nice command line interface, with a graphical
representation of the work the compressor is doing. However, as can be
seen from the timings above, it is a real *slug* compared to PKZip, LHArc,
and ARJ in terms of compress/uncompress speed. There is a good improvement
on compression from the previous release, but I feel SEA should have spent
more time on speed optimization rather than pretty interfaces. This
release is a year old -- perhaps things will change soon.
Current recommendations are PKZip and LHArc, in terms of compression,
speed, and usage. ARJ is better, but must become more popular in usage
before I can give it an enthusiastic recomendation. Note that LHArc and
ARJ both are capable of compressing LZEXE files even further -- PKZip
currently is not.
--
Arnold Gill --- astrophysician trainee in exile gill at physics.ubc.ca
********* Site for Unix compression programmes ********
zeus at zeus3.sozialwissenschaften.uni-mannheim.de (thomas neser) writes:
>i search lharc and zip sources for unix, which not only decompress.
>P.S. i use sunos 4.1, hpux 8.05 and munix.
lharc and zip, along with arc, jpeg, unzip, and zoo are all available
on grind.isca.uiowa.edu in the unix/arc-progs directory.
All but zip and unzip are full featured compress/uncompress/test/etc
programs. For zip you need both zip and unzip to get everything.
Firestar
--
*****************************************************************************
* Michael Pins (Firestar) | Internet: amigapd at isca.uiowa.edu *
* ISCA's Amiga Librarian | #include <std.disclaimer> *
*****************************************************************************
RGDS -=ROB=-
--
Rob Harper / E-mail: harper at convex.csc.fi
Finnish State Computer Centre / Molbio/software: harper at nic.funet.fi
P.O. Box 40, SF-02101 Espoo / Telephone: +358 0 457 2076
Finland / Fax: +358 0 457 2302
