[spwolf]

Hello Everyone,

Over the past few years, popularity of 64bit Windows has gone up through the roof and deservedly so since 64bit can address more than 4 GB of RAM (while 32bit can only address a bit more than 3 GB, which might not be sufficient today).

However, many people think that 64bit Windows is also significantly faster, and we quite often get asked why not build 64bit version of PA? Well answer is quite simple - our IDE (Delphi) does not support 64bit, so we can not make 64bit version of PA. That leads people to think that other utilities have (big) advantage over us in terms of speed/features/etc.

I asked our compression engineer what could the gain be and answer was between 5% and 10%. Which is nothing special really, but hey marketing wise, it is hard to convince people that it is only that much.

Recently, as part of our patchbeam engine, we developed special interface for two apps to talk between each other (which is usually not simple), and it worked fine. So we got this thought into our head - why not do the same for our compression engines? Specifically 7zip and unrar. It is actually not that much of big deal at all, we could do it and have 32bit app that has 64bit compression engine.

So while our engineers are perfecting PA 2011, i got into some testing... I took 100 MB TAR file (some files from Photoshop installation), and compressed/extracted it in 32bit and 64bit versions of Rar and 7zip.

Results were surprising.

Compression Results
7zip 32bit compression = 52.3s
7zip 64bit compression = 49.7s

Rar 32bit compression = 26.5s
Rar 64bit compression = 24.7s

So 7.3% for Rar and 5.2% for 7zip. Not bad? Not great either. Keep in mind that you shouldnt compare the times between the two, as 7zip has much stronger max compression and compressed the files 20% better.

Here comes the surprising part:

Extraction Results:

7zip 32bit extraction = 2.78s
7zip 64bit extraction = 2.87s

Rar 32bit extraction = 2.8s
Rar 64bit extraction = 3.0s

PA 32bit extraction = 2.68s

So 32bit is actually faster than 64bit during extraction... and what do we all do most? Extract files we download from Internet. Our optimized unrar 32bit extraction is 12% faster than 64bit Rar 4.0b3.

Question here is what to do - people will ask us to give them 64bit, even if it is actually slower than our current code. We can not ignore the big marketing that 64bit is and negative feedback we get when people realize there is no 64bit version. Should we ignore the test results and build the 64bit versions anyway?