winrar, winzip cpu usage

firstborn · 27 Mar 2007 at 23:26

Just upgraded to a dual core thingamy wotsit and was expecting great things. Able to run 3 trillion apps at once etc. But, when decompressing a file why the hell does winrar or winzip only manage to utilise 20% of the cpu when nowt else is going on.

What am I missing?

I've had a few tonight so please make your answers clear and concise

BruceLee · 27 Mar 2007 at 23:45

try 7zip, and also I find you are usually disk bound in unzipping stuff.

manjuice · 27 Mar 2007 at 23:46

Not sure about winzip but latest version of winrar has a multithread support.

Code:

Version 3.60

   1. Multithreaded version of RAR compression algorithm improves
      the compression speed on computers with several CPU,
      dual core CPU and processors with hyperthreading technology.
      Multithreading is enabled by default, but you can disable it
      in "General" part of "Settings" dialog.
      
      In the command line mode you can control multithreading with
      -mt switch.

firstborn · 27 Mar 2007 at 23:54

tchan_4 said:
Not sure about winzip but latest version of winrar has a multithread support.

Yehh, though of that but using winrar 3.7beta and multi threading enabled.

Also it maybe disk limited - think I'll experiment with raids and stuff.

I was just surprised that I seemd to gain little in unzipping files after upgrading.

squiffy · 27 Mar 2007 at 23:58

Simple, if decompressing don't use the same HD for both (if they're hundreds of MB or GB big)

CPU isn't the bottleneck, it's the HD. Can't expect to read, write, read and write on the same HD without slowdown.

firstborn · 28 Mar 2007 at 00:03

squiffy said:
Simple, if decompressing don't use the same HD for both (if they're hundreds of MB or GB big)

CPU isn't the bottleneck, it's the HD. Can't expect to read, write, read and write on the same HD without slowdown.

I always use seperate disks for any ops requiring read/write at same time.