Extracting Files speed?

[m0ore4ustin391]

Just to get an average here, I think I noticed a speed reduction in extracting large files with WinRAR. I recently gave a friend of mine a 2g ram stick to use with his PC and ever since I have noticed a major performance reduction on my current system. Noticeably with file extraction with WinRAR. I have a 2G file and it takes around 2 minutes to extract, I used to be able to do it in 1min or less.

Does the amount of memory have anything to do with extracting files?

What are your extracting speeds on files sizes?

 

[OldMX]

Your computer and your friend's specs please?

 

[Joe Average]

It could be as simple as a "RAM starved system" in your case now that you have much less RAM available. Decompression takes a lot of variables: RAM speed, RAM timings, CPU speed, FSB speed, storage speed, free space on the storage (a drive over 85% full is going to "choke" for free space to decompress the new material into), etc.

All sorts of things come into this...

 

[m0ore4ustin391]

Your computer and your friend's specs please?

Friends specs seems kind of pointless to list considering im trying to find out how long it takes other people to extract a 2G or larger file using WinRAR to compare to my speed to see if I am getting the most out of my system or if i need to go back to 4G of ram.

My comp sepcs below:

Windows 7 pro 32bit
2g DDR2 1066 Ram
One 1TB 7200rpm WD Hard drive
Two 500mb WD Hard Drive
AMD Phenom 9950 x4
EVGA 9800GTX+ GPU
GIGABYTE GA-MA770-UD3 Mobo
700W PSU

 

[Demon10000]

2GB of 1KB files is going to take waaaaaay longer than 2GB of 1GB files. You can't compare extraction speed on different files.

 

[Joe Average]

Since you're using WinRAR, just do the internal benchmark at Tools - Benchmark and hardware test. Those results are actually something you can use for comparison across machines, not just some random 2GB archive.

Just for the record, this old ThinkPad T60 w/Core Duo T2300 @ 1.66 GHz w/1.5GB DDR2 533 gives 727 on that benchmark. I had a Core 2 Duo SP9400 recently (2.4 GHz) with 4GB of DDR3 800 in it and that had a score of ~1300 (both are laptop processors).

The basic rule of thumb (since everything relates as I said before): big large single files will decompress faster than thousands of small ones, it's just how things work, not just the CPU and RAM. Those components can handle such decompression easily, but the storage devices pulling thousands of small pieces of files and then having to write thousands of them - high random file activity - is going to choke it big time and yes, you can see performance cut in half, literally.

Here's a tip that'll improve your decompression speeds considerably:

You have three hard drives, use one of them for the storage of the archives, and when you extract do it to one of the other hard drives - this way you can read and write at the same time (read from source, write to target) and your decompression will improve dramatically. Use the same physical drive for both actions and you choke it 50% - it can't read and write at the same time, so using two hard drives in the operation literally doubles the performance alone over a single one.

 

[m0ore4ustin391]

Well i just ran the WinRAR benchmark and got 1558 score (not sure if thats high or low).

Also I know that windows 7 requires 1g of RAM to operate so im sure having only 1g extra for background tasks, programs, games, etc will start to choke my system. I multitask like nothing else always running multiple programs so I think i need to add another 2G of ram to my system.

 

[Joe Average]

Windows 7 requires less than 512MB for itself - meaning the base operating system components, and actually I've done testing on machines with 512MB of RAM and after a few reboots after the installation is complete, the system will settle itself and use about 240MB, seriously.

It doesn't require a lot of memory to be functional, but unlike previous versions of Windows (XP and older, Vista handles memory a bit differently but nowhere near as efficiently as 7 does) Windows 7 makes actual use of the RAM you have, and the more you can put in a machine, the better Windows 7 will use it.

The quad core you have should give something close to the score you posted - 1558 - plus or minus maybe 100 points either way so you're doing quite well. There's a limit with decompression on how fast a machine will be, and even though WinRAR is now a properly multithreaded application, it's not going to "hit" all 4 of those cores equally, nor will it even hit them to any significant degree because decompression takes almost nothing to do it - compressing files is where you'll see massive CPU usage in comparison. Decompressing files is a literal cake walk...

If your system had 4GB and now it's down to 2GB then go get another 2GB and put in there so Windows 7 has more RAM to play with (Superfetch loves RAM, of course). I'm of the mind that you could probably eek out higher performance by tweaking the RAM timings as well - WinRAR and compression/decompression tasks can benefit dramatically from very low RAM timings.

But that score looks just fine to me. I had a Q6600 in a desktop with 4GB of DDR2 800 4-4-4-12 a few months ago, WinRAR 4 beta 1 showed ~1350 or so on the benchmark (which stresses only the CPU and RAM, with very little hit on the storage) so again, your score appears to be right about where it should be.

 

[m0ore4ustin391]

Windows 7 requires less than 512MB for itself - meaning the base operating system components, and actually I've done testing on machines with 512MB of RAM and after a few reboots after the installation is complete, the system will settle itself and use about 240MB, seriously.

It doesn't require a lot of memory to be functional, but unlike previous versions of Windows (XP and older, Vista handles memory a bit differently but nowhere near as efficiently as 7 does) Windows 7 makes actual use of the RAM you have, and the more you can put in a machine, the better Windows 7 will use it.

The quad core you have should give something close to the score you posted - 1558 - plus or minus maybe 100 points either way so you're doing quite well. There's a limit with decompression on how fast a machine will be, and even though WinRAR is now a properly multithreaded application, it's not going to "hit" all 4 of those cores equally, nor will it even hit them to any significant degree because decompression takes almost nothing to do it - compressing files is where you'll see massive CPU usage in comparison. Decompressing files is a literal cake walk...

If your system had 4GB and now it's down to 2GB then go get another 2GB and put in there so Windows 7 has more RAM to play with (Superfetch loves RAM, of course). I'm of the mind that you could probably eek out higher performance by tweaking the RAM timings as well - WinRAR and compression/decompression tasks can benefit dramatically from very low RAM timings.

But that score looks just fine to me. I had a Q6600 in a desktop with 4GB of DDR2 800 4-4-4-12 a few months ago, WinRAR 4 beta 1 showed ~1350 or so on the benchmark (which stresses only the CPU and RAM, with very little hit on the storage) so again, your score appears to be right about where it should be.

Nice post. Lots of information and questions answered right there.

Thanks for the help, I wonder if my new sandybridge 2600k system will do any better (after they get the recall sorted out by May)?

 

[Joe Average]

Do any better at what? Decompressing? I just explained there's a point where it's only going to happen so fast, throwing a better CPU at it won't change things, nor will faster storage (SSD, RAM, etc) because decompression is simple and easy to do.

Decompression doesn't particularly scale well with more horsepower behind it, but compression will. It's like an example from years past: I had a Pentium 233 many many years ago (laptop as the Pentium chips basically stopped at 200 MHz on the desktop front) and playing an mp3 file, even a lowly 128 Kbps one, tended to use a somewhat respectable amount of CPU time (like 30% or more with those old machines).

Nowadays, doing the same task - playing the same exact mp3 file - doesn't even make the CPU twitch in terms of decoding/processing power. Same principle with decompression of archives: cracking them open is the easy part, creating them in the first place is where you've got to have the raw power to get it done as quickly as possible. Opening RARs or other archive sets on modern CPUs is pretty much an afterthought.

Another thing that requires a ton of CPU horsepower are PAR sets, primarily used with Usenet binary postings for recovery (PAR meaning parity sets that can recover/repair damaged files). THAT can choke a machine pretty severely, even the most powerful boxes out there, and far more so than doing the compression in the first place. Really intensive computational power requirements on that parity creation/repair work.