File_Archive

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File_Archive v1.4 released
The new version has been released with a lot of good stuff. (wildcards, cache for zip writer, simplified syntax...)

A forum has been created
You can discuss about File_Archive, ask some questions about it... in the newly created forum

File_Archive 1.3 is out
With File_Archive 1.3, you can now edit existing archives (add or remove files)

File_Archive 1.2 is out
File_Archive 1.2 now supports reading and writing to the following formats:
tar, tgz, tbz, bz2, gzip, ar, deb

File_Archive is now a PEAR package
pOOcl has been renamed File_Archive and is now part of PEAR.
See the PEAR page of File_Archive.


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Detail of the comparision

I have compared File_Archive v1.3.0 with pclZip v2.3 and Archive_Tar v1.3.1
The comparision has been done on the following points:

  • Compression of a folder to a zip archive
  • Extraction of a zip archive to a folder
  • Compression of a folder to a tgz archive
  • Extraction of a tgz archive to a folder

The tests have been runned on a Thinkpad T42p with factory hardware, on Windows XP Pro
You can look at the source code of the script
The task was the compression of 94MB of data located in 103 files
Don't hesitate to give me your feedback if you feel the benchmark is not fair for any of the libraries (I honnestly think it is).
The caching of the files by the OS has a tremendous importance on the results. To reduce the effects and make the test more fair, I read all the files (so that they are cached) before executing the actual compressions by the libraries. Furthermore, I ran the test twice: once with File_Archive doing the job first, and once with pclZip / Archive_Tar acting first.

The test only compares the execution time, which says nothing about each factor (CPU time, IO time...), and nothing about memory consumption. If you know how to measure precisely these factors independently, please leave me a comment.

The results

Here are the results, for each test and each library. Times are in second

Test File_Archive pclZip / Archive_Tar Ratio Other / File_Archive
Zip generation 7.49 7.54 1.0066
7.53 8.17 1.084
Zip extraction 14.35 15.07 1.050
11.79 16.53 1.40
Tgz generation 8.12 9.32 1.15
7.28 9.21 1.27
Tgz extraction 10.79 11.87 1.10
14.16 20.65 1.46

File_Archive is faster on all the tests I made. In average, it appears to be 19% faster than pclZip / Archive_Tar.

Here is the raw output of the benchmark script