The Old Joel on Software Forum: Part 5 (of 5)

Best Compression Program?

What's the best Zip program now? Is it bzip2? or 7-Zip perhaps? Are there any others? I know both are better than WinZip. Using 7-Zip on my install program (instead of WinZip) I save about 500k. Not bad.

Zip
Friday, July 30, 2004

Have you considered WinRAR or WinACE?

I usually get much nicer compression rates with them than with regular ZIPs.

Gabriel Landau
Friday, July 30, 2004

Just out of curiousity, why do you need the zip? In this era of broadband and writable DVDs, it's rare you really need to squeeze that extra bit of compression out of anything.

www.MarkTAW.com
Friday, July 30, 2004

I second winrar. I can rar a 16 gb database small enough to burn on a cd.

Formerly someone else
Friday, July 30, 2004

Define "better".

Better compression? Faster compression? Better compression in same amount of time?

Freely available? As source code? As a library or utility?

Chris Tavares
Friday, July 30, 2004

Not everyone is on broadband!

I am now, used to have a phone line that would not get more than 25K. In that circumstance, saving 500K saves several minutes.

And compressing 25Meg to 10Meg is a big difference.

.
Friday, July 30, 2004

WinRAR rocks.

www.alexlechuck.com
Friday, July 30, 2004

WinRAR compress more but it's is _very_ slow.

Nix
Friday, July 30, 2004

"I can rar a 16 gb database small enough to burn on a cd."

That's a good use. Plus you specify an archive size, so if it won't fit on 1 CD, you can get it on to 3 CDs.

www.MarkTAW.com
Saturday, July 31, 2004

as far as i know best of mainstream is [win]rar3+.
however there are better in compression ratio.
best or very close to best is rk. there was console version that was free, now it's commercial winrk, can be found at http://www.msoftware.co.nz/

killer
Saturday, July 31, 2004

Bandwidth is about 5 cents/GB.

One million people are going to download the 20 MB new release of your product.

That bandwidth will cost you $1000.

Or you compress your 20 MB and find that it's now only 12 MB. Because it is 12 MB, another 1 million people dialup users download your product.

So you distribute to twice as many customers (2 million) for only a little more money ($1200).

Of course, this is contrived, but I hope you can appreciate that there's some logic to it.

Reply to "Best Compression Program?"
Saturday, July 31, 2004

Also a good point, but then ZIP would probably be the only way to go because it's the only format with the proper market pentration. Unless you bundle an unzipper in your app and package it as an install.exe, of course.

So "Best Compression Program" isn't for widely distributing files amongst the world.

www.MarkTAW.com
Saturday, July 31, 2004

Maybe http://rzip.samba.org/ can be useful if the files are realy big. If you have the RAM and time to spend..

Fredrik Svensson
Monday, August 2, 2004