multi-threaded file compressor

[dZeus]

a new release of my favourite file compressor WinRAR 3.60 beta 1 incorporates multi-threaded compressing, and it's a good deal faster on my Hyperthreading cpu, so it probably is even a lot faster on machines with 2 cores. atm only multi-threaded for RAR compression, hopefully multi-threaded ZIP support will be added too.

[Nowhere]

7zip also has support for multi-threading, for a long time actually. Of course, in its native format, 7z. (I'm not sure plain zip...but you can check it, the app is free in beer & speech)

[az]

And I thought the slow part of compressing and decompressing files were the HD accesses.

[KeiFront]

Great feature, just did some benchmarks and it's between 20-40%. faster. Only one downside all cores are at 100% now .

[dZeus]

And I thought the slow part of compressing and decompressing files were the HD accesses.

that depends on the compression ratio used/achieved, etc. Generally when you have 0 compression ratio (probably most widely used for archiving lossy video/audio/pictures) compression/decompression speed will be limited by disk IO speed. At the other end of the spectrum it will be limited by cpu speed.

[High_Jumbllama]

And I thought the slow part of compressing and decompressing files were the HD accesses.

7ZIPs ultra compression is extremely CPU intensive compressing on my 3ghzHT machine at less than 900KBPS with file sizes being maybe 20% smaller.