Open large archives benchmark (original) (raw)

Open large archive test results

Benchmark methods

Benchmark input archives are saved in a fast SSD system disk, and opened by the tested applications - which are already started.
A median time in seconds over 3 tests is reported as time to open the archive for browsing.
Since the tests took place on different machines for Windows, Linux, and macOS systems, 7-Zip benchmark score (rounded) is reported for reference in "Hardware settings" paragraph.

Caveats

Benchmark listing times results (the lower the better)

| | 25K | 250K | 25K-flat | | | ----------------------------- | ---- | -------- | ---- | | PeaZip WIN64 | 2.0 | 4.8 | 9.8 | | PeaZip WIN64 (Fast mode) | 0.7 | 1.3 | 9,2 | | 7-Zip | 0.6 | 0.7 | 0.6 | | WinRar | 0.7 | 3.3 | 5.7 | | MS Compressed Folders | 1.5 | 748.0 | 6.0 | | PeaZip for Linux GTK2 | 2.0 | 4.8 | 9.3 | | PeaZip for Linux Qt5 | 2.0 | 4,7 | 3.8 | | Gnome Archive Manager | 1.2 | 5.0 | 1.7 | | PeaZip for macOS aarch64 | 1.1 | 3.4 | 36.0 | | PeaZip for macOS x86_64 | 1.6 | 4.4 | 55.0 | | PeaZip for Linux GTK2 aarch64 | 1.8 | 3.2 | 5.2 |

Performances opening archives containing an increasingly large number of itemsWhile up to a few thousands items per archive the time needed to open the archive is barely noticeable, for any of the tested apps, on a modern machine, with the 25K and 250K items benchmarks it become evident how well each application scales in efficiency for listing an increasingly larger number of items.

All applications (excluding 7-Zip) took a significant performance hit increasing items per archive from 10s of thousands up to 100s of thousands items per archive, with MS Compressed Folders being unable to complete the 250K test in under 3 minutes (and was consequently stopped).

With out-of-the-box configuration (default Normal mode), PeaZip shows a performance trend similar to WinRar and Gnome Archive manager in handling increasingly larger archives, but it is slower than both apps and of 7-Zip, which is the fastest tested application.

In Fast mode, PeaZip becomes almost as fast as 7-Zip in both 25K and 250K tests, significantly faster than other tested apps.

fastest app to open large archives

Pre-parsing analysis of archive content with PeaZip

PeaZip performs a comprehensive pre-parsinganalysis of the archive content on opening, listing the entire archive content (not only the root level), which clearly adds a penalty in terms of raw performances.
As tradeoff, this step is meant:

  1. to warn the user of possible archive content integrity issues in advance
  2. to reconcile inconsistencies, omissions, and errors / corruption in archive's TOC in order to be able to create an usable representation of the content for the file browser (and additionally a treeview representation of the structure of directories inside the archive)
  3. to display comprehensive stats about the archive content (size, numberof files, folders, compression ratio, content of each single directory in archive...) PeaZip can automatically turn off parts of pre-parsing process in order to preserve performances, and can completely skip pre-browsing: this behavior can be set in Options > Settings, Browser optimization in the Performance group.
    By default PeaZip is in Normal mode, which pre-.parses up to mdium archives (in the range of few 256 K items in archive), while Fast mode has pre-parsing turned off unless listing issues are auto-detected while opening the archive.Performances rendering a large number of items in the archive browser

25K-flat test shows mainly the efficiency in displaying a large number of items at once in the file / archive manager component.

In this test the best possible advantage is the implementation of a virtual list view, which is probably the key factor in 7-Zip and Gnome Archive Manager performances for 25K-flat being almost identical to 25K case, unlike other applications including PeaZip, which lacks this mechanism.
Swithcing PeaZip to Fast mode does not improve speed much in this test, as the rendering part is unaffected.

The second most important key factor in this test is the efficieny of the underlying Operating System's widget setin rendering the list view items.
This become evident with PeaZip, which uses different widget sets on Windows, Linux, and macOS, with the Linux versions being significantly faster than Windows and macOS ones - despising the Linux test machine being by far the slowest one accordingly to the 7-Zip benchmark ratings.
On Linux, Qt5 widget set significantly outperforms GTK2 and provides a surprisingly good result, as faster application not implementing a virtual treeview.
On macOS, the rendering times were noticeably slower than on Linux and Windows, either because Lazarus (the IDE using to build PeaZip) is less mature on this platform or because of performances of Cocoa widget set functions involved.
The difference is even more evident when comparing the app versions running on macOS/Cocoa aarch64, and on Asahi Linux/GTK2 arrch64, with the latter verion being about 7x faster than the macOS one in this specifc UI-intensive test.

what is the fastest app to open zip files

Conclusions: what is the fastest application for browsing archives?

Fastest application to browse large archives
7-Zip is the fastest application to open / browse large archives in all tests.
Out-of-the-box, PeaZip is slower than better optimized apps as WinRar and Gnome Archive Manager, due to a time-consuming full archive pre-parsing analysis stage meant to detect issues and provide information about the archive.
However, its shows a comparable capability in scaling performances for opening in reasonable times archives in the range of 10s thousands to 100s thousands of items.

Optimize PeaZip for browsing large archives
PeaZip in Fast modeis almost as fast as 7-Zip, and significantly faster than any of the other tested apps, unless it is needed to display many thousands of items at once in the GUI.
Lacking a virtual list view implementation it is inherently limited by the efficiency of the underlying OS widget set; in this case Qt5 widgetset provides the best performances for PeaZip, being even faster than WinRar and Windows Compressed Folders in this test.

Performances comparison of integrated system utilities
As for system utilities, Gnome Archive Manager clearly surpasses MS Compressed Folders, and it has comparable performances with PeaZip for Linux - faster on 25K archive, slower on 250K archive, fasterto represent a very large number of items at once in the GUI.

Performances on Apple Silicon vs Intel
On an M1 Apple Silicon machine, the native macOS aarch64 build consistently performed better than the x86_64 build, ranging from 25% to 40% faster performances.

macOS vs Linux performances on Apple Silicon

The first two benchmarks, opening 25K items archive and 250K items archive, which mostrly rely on app's own efficiency, shows quite siimilar results, with macOS aarch64 version being faster on the smaller archive and the Linux aarch64 scaling better on the larger archive.
The last benchmark, which rely heavily on widget-set ability to render in the UI a 25K items "flat" archive, shows a clear advantage for the Linux/GTK2 version which is about 7 times faster than the macOS/Cocoa version, despising the GTK2 widegt set not being the fast one available on Linux platform.

Synopsis: Open large archives benchmark. What is the fastest application to open large archives? Comparison of archive browsing speed with 7-Zip, PeaZip, and WinRar. Archive listing benchmark methods, time to open results, comparative of speed of archive manager utilities for browsing archives containing thousands of files and folders. Speed test on Windows, Linux, and macOS aarch64 and Intel.

Topics: PeaZip vs 7-Zip vs WinRar list large archive content benchmark, which is the fastest application

PeaZip > Compression benchmark > Open large archives benchmark