Using 7 Zip
 

I dont know how much this will apply to, but it would work for everthing Non-CVS related. Pretty sure most of you have heard of 7zip, but I dont see anyone using it here. Anyhow, here is some quick numbers for it incase you guys might be interested in it.


The smaller the amount, the less difference, but witht the Map difference alone, it would trim quite a little bit of the download time for people with a little slower connections. Overall just for the stuff here on this site, your looking at a saving of almost 100MB.

Anyhow, im just ranting on about this, but I Still cant belive how good the compression is on 7zip, to be open-source and free. Just goes to show you the best things in life are free....... /end rant

I used to use 7zip, until I found Izarc.

I noticed for compression 7zip was notably compact, but so much slower (doubly slow for decompression it seemed) that it wasnt worth the small difference in space saved.

That was some time ago, and perhaps 7zip has improved but never bothered to check, since I fulfill all my needs with Izarc.

There are a few problems with 7zip. It's extremely slow, it isn't widely accepted yet (at least compared to Zip, Rar, or gzip on *nix), and often times the difference in size between it and winrar are negliable, if anything at all. Though, there were a few times in my test experiments when 7zip blew everybody else away which impressed me, but not enough to switch.

When I am on Windows, I use Winrar. Quick, good compression, and most people are already setup for it. When I am using Linux and only intending on working with said file on Linux gzip is the only way to go. Why? Because the compression is decent and the speed with gzip on *nix is sick. (I've compressed 1GB text in 3 seconds, reducing it to around 150MB) Now, if the file is going to be spread among different people and different platforms I am forced to use slow, bloated zip. The reason being is it works easily on Windows, *nix, and MacOS.

True on the speed, 7zip is alot slower than rar, but I dont notice much on my current rig. The C2D seems to pull throuhg it a speeds that I am very happy with. I havent used it on anything prior so I dont know. I do know that it takes me roughly 20 secs longer to unzip the map pack under 7 zip then it does on winrar, but for the adding savings in file size, I am trimming off roughly 8-10 min on download time on a 1.5Mbs DSL connection.

Hmm, now that I look at it, the rewards are not that great since 7z is not a widely used format.

Nevermind my dull and pointless post.... should of really looked at the pro's and cons to it.