Slow unpacking

[Anam Cara]

I haven't been using PowerArchiver for some time now, but I installed it on my girlfriends rig and was a bit baffled over the speed of unpacking. I thought there was something wrong with the drives or such at first. It turned out that using PowerArchiver as a benchmark wasn't such a good idea. I took the biggest file I had (4 GB RAR) and timed the unpacking, from a DMA133-drive to a S-ATA drive. Then had a friend try the exact same file, the difference was pretty high and soon, I resorted to installing winRAR. Poof, unpacking time was cut down by about 33%. (more exactly 03:40 minutes to 02:22)

Now, did I config powerarchiver wrong or something, or do the programs use different write chunk sizes and WinRARs chunk size happened to fit my drive cluster size better or...something? I am out on a limb here, I know. But now my girlfriends trial version is about to expire and so I want to see if I can remedy this before/if I do a purchase for her.

/Anam

[TBGBe]

As RAR format is proprietry, the unrar.dll has to be obtained from rar-labs.
I am guessing that they may have a reason to ensure that WinRar always performs better than other third party utilities which have to use the dll.

Perhaps a better test would be using the "open" format 7zip to compare the speed of both utilities.
At the same time, you could also compare the price and supported formats for compressing - of course.

[davidsplash]

the unrar.dll is slow and in fact thats right what you said. However Its not the only problem. On some other formats powerarchjiver is slow butr better. If you list the files running on your computer at the same time as extracting that could help the developers work out what files might be conflicting or contributing to pa slowness as well.

[spwolf]

it might be possible that something else turned out to be different, in general I dont notice any speed difference between using WinRar and PA... I will test it as well but before there were no significant differences...

thanks,

[spwolf]

Try checking "Use current folder as temp" in Options> Misc> Speed, and that should work faster actually.

That will make PowerArchiver unrar directly to the location and not to the temp folder first, which will obviously be faster. It should not matter on local drive since data is just moved, not copied but between drives this data needs to be copied once again and hence the slow down...

I didnt have time to test it, but that should be it...

[deipotent]

Try disabling your AV real-time protection as well when doing the test, and see if that improves things.