WinRAR and bottle necks?

Psy-Blade · 27 Sep 2009 at 15:15

Hey guys,

I spend a large amount of time, rarring, unrarring and henerally working with archives.

I've always wondered where the bottleneck is with regards winrars performance.

I've got 4 instances now, rarring up a total of 120gb of data, using 90% of my cpu, however disk usuge is only around 20mb/s.

if I have only one instance the CPU sits at around 10% and disk usage is very low, so whats slowing it down? Is it my ram??

Thanks

rpstewart · 27 Sep 2009 at 15:27

Psy-Blade said:
if I have only one instance the CPU sits at around 10% and disk usage is very low

I'm surprised at that, normally the disk is the bottleneck with WinRAR.

Psy-Blade · 27 Sep 2009 at 15:29

That was my initial thought, that my disks couldn't feed my cpu fast enough. But I opened up resource monitor and the source file was only being read at around 8mb/s.

Pho · 27 Sep 2009 at 15:36

Have you tried other programs to compare speed? 7-zip will read rar files but not write them - instead it has 7z compression which is much better in my experience.

Psy-Blade · 27 Sep 2009 at 15:39

Hmm I've always used winrar out of habit. I hadn't actually considered using anything else though I find when I do find a 7z file less people know what to do with it. Oh well, I guess I could try it

.

Thanks

rpstewart · 27 Sep 2009 at 15:40

Psy-Blade said:
That was my initial thought, that my disks couldn't feed my cpu fast enough. But I opened up resource monitor and the source file was only being read at around 8mb/s.

Is anything else using the disk(s)?

Psy-Blade · 27 Sep 2009 at 15:48

Nope nothing

. Highest read is System (file is the one winrar is using) at 8mb.

Frapple · 27 Sep 2009 at 15:54

Are you reading and writing to the same disk?

TheVoice · 27 Sep 2009 at 15:57

If you're on a 64-bit version of Windows, perhaps try the 64-bit version of WinRAR. Not sure what difference it makes to performance though, if any.

sturmtruppe · 27 Sep 2009 at 16:26

any version before 3.90 is a waste of time.

3.90 is x64 compatible, can properly make use of multiple cores and is just generally better, its so good infact that ive actually paid for it.

Psy-Blade · 27 Sep 2009 at 16:46

Yeah I'm using the 64bit version 3.90 too.

I'm reading and writing to the same disk but its 2x Samsung F3's in raid 0 with am average read of 200mb/s across the disk.

Thanks for all your ideas guys, I thought I was right in thinking that it should use more than maybe 5-10% of my system resources. I wonder where the issue is :S.