Hyperthreaded Unzipping?

[polive]

I'm trying WinRAR and 7Zip. I cannot find anywhere to explain how to make these apps do hyperthreading; they only will use 4 cores, and not the other 4 virtual cores.

Any help would be apprciated!

CPU is a 2600k in sig with the rest of the system.

Oh, also in 7zip there is a benchmark and it uses all 8 cores....??? But in real world situations it does not.

 

[nessus]

Are you compressing files back onto the same hard drive? Resource contention at the HD level may be your issue.

 

[Joe Average]

Unzipping, unraring, all that stuff - decompression of archives - is almost nothing at all, doesn't require much CPU power at all. Hyperthreading is intended to give a little "umph" to the processing power when it's required. Unless you miraculously had some instance where decompressing such an archive pushed all the cores towards 90% usage (ain't gonna happen) then you'd see some "benefit" from HT.

Decompressing archives is nothing at all - creating them is when you get the bump. Take any given file (something that's big enough where it takes time to get the job done, like minutes) and compress it with HT disabled, then redo it with HT enabled, and you should see the typical 10-15% "benefit" from having HT kick in. HT shouldn't really be considered "virtual cores" either - it's not that powerful, and typically only provides a 10-15% bump in apps that can make use of the additional threads presented when HT is enabled and working properly.

I re-read the post twice but the title says "Unzipping" so that's why my comments focused on that aspect. With respect to compressing the archives, HT may simply not be of any use to the compressor itself because of coding aspects - it may simply not recognize the additional processing threads that HT offers.

 

[polive]

Thanks guys. Got it. In my head I want to see these things be super speed demons, but the reality is different.

 

[zero2dash]

I was curious about this with my SR-2 after reading your post....
so far I can say after doing some digging around through google and also the 7zip site/forums, it looks like 7zip will let you use smp when compressing depending on the method/algorithm used...for instance when trying to compress to 7z, LZMA only lets you use 1-2 cores, but BZip2 lets me pick all 24 on my SR-2. (actually goes higher than that [32])

As for decompressing, yeah, it doesn't look like there's any options whatsoever for using smp.
I don't know about WinRAR, I don't use it.