Winzip vs. Winrar

There has been a discussion going on here in our technology forum for a month or so now which ive been watching with interest. Compression programs to me are a really essential part of a PC. Most of us use compression to send files through email, uploading, or even via an IM client, and there is always alot of debate over which compression routine is the best.

Today I decided to test the major formats to give an overall impression of how they all work, mainly for size, but also for speed.

I recently received a CD from ATI with the MMC 8.0 from the AIW 9700 Pro and I extracted some folders to test the compression programs with. These folders contain a variety of file types, msi, ini, exe, cab, dat, dll, inx, cat, sys, bin etc. so its a fair indication of how each program will compress in everyday use. 111 files and 10 folders.

Here are my findings, based on maximum compression settings for all programs used, to create a self extracting archive, with results based on file size and speed to compress, my system is based on a AMD 2400+ XP processor running at 2700XP speeds

Original folder size 104 MB (109,598,591)

Winzip 8.1
74.6 MB (78,266,865) time to compress 19 secs

Winrar V3
67.4 MB (70,691,417) time to compress 2 mins 5 secs

Winace V2.2
67.0MB (70,341,226) time to compress 1 min 49 secs

Stuffit V7.5 By Aladdin systems.
72.3 MB (75,873,861) time to compress 1 min 53 secs

So its appears from these results that the new version of Winace (2.2) is in fact the highest compressing application out there, and in fact ive verified this with other tests also using non extracting archives. Its also a little bit faster than Winrar3. Winzip gives the worst results but the speed of its compression routines are alot higher than the others. Stuffit V7.5 was supplied to me by the company Aladdin systems for inclusion into the test and was originally developed for Macintosh and is probably "the standard" on that platform, so it was worthwhile including in this test.

 

decompression

ok as you asked I went back to test the self extracting archives detailed in my last post by performing a decompression.


Winzip - time to decompress 10 seconds

Winrar - time to decompress 11 seconds

Winace - time to decompress 8 seconds

Stuffit - time to decompress 1 min 16 secs

 

there really are hundreds of compression applications out there alot of which basically use the zip technology, and if I wanted to do something indepth it really would probably take weeks to it correctly and indepth... I really just concentrated on the 3 most widely used programs available (with a lesser known one thrown in).

have you tried 7zip? what you think?