Since Vista doesn't have compatibility for .RAR files, what should I use?
I tried WinRAR but it didn't really work.
> (1) Free -- download it at no cost.
> (2) Open -- source code and format specifications available.
the same can be said about zip and bzip2.
> (3) Decent -- 7z does pretty good compression, better than ZIP.
uncompressed zip + bzip2 does better, and zip and bzip2 are far more common than 7z.
7zip's compression is generally cited as being better than bzip2.
Problem with bzip2 is you can only actually compress one file with it. If you're going to put a zip in it then you may as well put a tar in it.
Not only is 7zip's LZMA compression better than bzip2, but LZMA decompresses at a reasonable speed as well. bzip2 encodes a little faster, but is slow as fuck to decode.
I used to compress my old HTTP logs with bzip2. I knocked that off, because it took forever anytime I wanted to search them.
To make that more concrete, here's a compression test I did a while back on 101 MB of Apache logs.
$ ls -lS logs.*
-rw-r--r-- 1 me me 13457837 Jun 1 15:01 logs.lzf (87.29%, 0.66s)
-rw-r--r-- 1 me me 11338736 Jun 1 15:01 logs.lzo (89.29%, 1.06s)
-rw-r--r-- 1 me me 6561300 Jun 1 15:00 logs.gz (93.80%, 5.03s)
-rw-r--r-- 1 me me 4041193 Dec 15 10:51 logs.lzpx (96.18%, 13.00s)
-rw-r--r-- 1 me me 4000415 Jun 1 15:00 logs.bz2 (96.22%, 116.00s)
-rw-r--r-- 1 me me 3001727 Oct 20 00:43 logs.pmd (96.28%, 435.79s)
-rw-r--r-- 1 me me 3938324 Jun 16 10:49 logs.lzma (97.17%, 14.15s)
-rw-r--r-- 1 me me 1731711 Jun 1 18:32 logs.paq7 (98.36%, 11052.32s)Decompressing speed:
$ time paq7 logs.paq7 logs
193m27.43s real 185m3.48s user 0m1.68s system
$ time ppmd d logs.pmd
0m25.62s real 0m19.40s user 0m1.51s system
$ time lzpxj d logs.lzpx logs
0m27.04s real 0m14.17s user 0m0.66s system
$ time bunzip2 -c <logs.bz2 >/dev/null
0m11.33s real 0m11.10s user 0m0.03s system
$ time lunzmash -c <logs.lzma >/dev/null
0m1.98s real 0m1.73s user 0m0.05s system
$ time gunzip -c <logs.gz >/dev/null
0m0.85s real 0m0.76s user 0m0.02s system
$ time lzop -dc <logs.lzo >/dev/null
0m0.72s real 0m0.65s user 0m0.02s system
$ time unlzf <logs.lzf >/dev/null
0m0.59s real 0m0.29s user 0m0.03s systemSo I was wrong. LZMA compressed almost ten times as fast as bzip2. It took one-sixth as long (and only twice as long as gzip) to decompress. I used default settings for LZMASH (Unix bzip2-like program based on LZMA), bzip2, and gzip.
It surely depends on the type of data, but I'm still gonna say LZMA kicks bzip2's ass.