PA 21.00.18 running on Windows 7 64 bit.
I made a big .PA file and thought I’d check it was made correctly with Menu / Actions / Test.
Discovered:
a) PA always issues a UAC prompt to do this!
b) PA always says there are many errors in PA files.
WinRAR 5 has a rather useful option in some cases, which is to be able to create an archive by replacing identical files with a reference to the first occurrence (hardlink) within the archive.
In case you choose to convert the file with PowerArchiver to another format, however, the resulting archive does not have all the files. It does not consider those that were present as hardlinks.
If you do a normal extraction of the RAR archive instead, even with PowerArchivier, all the files are extracted correctly.
When adding to a file archive, and selecting for example PA format, strong optimization method, extreme compression. In the Advanced Options section you change to Automatic, EXE Filter and PDF filter . You return to the main section and save the Profile. When you then reload the profile you do not have the Automatic options of EXE Filter and PDF saved there.
I noticed that instead if you change other options they are saved correctly (except for the Filter box values).
Also among the various changes to the advanced options you click the “Calculate RAM usage” button the value seems to be added to the previous one. You can see it for example just by clicking the button twice in a row, the value changes. Edit: actually after many attempts now it seems to write a stable value (it does not change with each click). Maybe a synchronization problem in the calculation?
Used PowerArchivier 2023 but there is the same behavior with the 2022
Very, very slow
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I have been a long time user and have usually upgraded pretty much every year but wow, did this application get slow.
1.9 GB file compressing using LZMA2 with Ultra on a i7-3770 w/20 GB of ram
PowerArchiver took 12.28 minutes and compressed the file to 430 MB
RAR 5 took 2:15 minutes and compressed the file down to 481 MB. Keep in mind that I bought this once back many years ago and my license key still works. No yearly upgrades required.
7-ZIP took 4:02 minutes and compressed the file down to 414 MB. This is free
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I have been a long time user and have usually upgraded pretty much every year but wow, did this application get slow.
1.9 GB file compressing using LZMA2 with Ultra on a i7-3770 w/20 GB of ram
PowerArchiver took 12.28 minutes and compressed the file to 430 MB
RAR 5 took 2:15 minutes and compressed the file down to 481 MB. Keep in mind that I bought this once back many years ago and my license key still works. No yearly upgrades required.
7-ZIP took 4:02 minutes and compressed the file down to 414 MB. This is free
LZMA2 is slow for us, as always, as we can use only 1 core (otherwise 7zip dll crashes when used by PA)… LZMA is 2x faster since it is multicore.
Something hopefully we can improve for next version finally.
Where PA is fastest is ZIP compression and RAR extraction (right now we are using standard unrar due to new version 5.xx, but will be again faster than standard unrar by the end of the year once we have time to apply optimizations).
Only problem we have with compression/extract speed right now is LZMA2 which simply crashes our application when multicore is used.
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LZMA2 was developed to take advantage of multiple cores. It is MUCH faster than LZMA with more cores. What computer these days don’t have multiple cores? Heck, even my phone has more cores than what PA can handle without crashing.
So it isn’t as fast as WinRar 5 when dealing with rar files, everything blows it out of the water with 7zip files and you are still developing for machines made 10 years ago. PA is spending too much time trying to make the application look pretty but going backwards with what goes on with the actual compression. Yeah, I think it is time to move on
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LZMA2 was developed to take advantage of multiple cores. It is MUCH faster than LZMA with more cores. What computer these days don’t have multiple cores? Heck, even my phone has more cores than what PA can handle without crashing.
So it isn’t as fast as WinRar 5 when dealing with rar files, everything blows it out of the water with 7zip files and you are still developing for machines made 10 years ago. PA is spending too much time trying to make the application look pretty but going backwards with what goes on with the actual compression. Yeah, I think it is time to move on
as I mentioned before, 7zip dll crashes when LZMA2 is used on multicore inside PA. It is not like we dont want it to be multicore, but we have to work around it. There is no going backwards, it never worked properly with LZMA2.
So right now, if you are only using LZMA2, then PA is not a good choice. For everything else, PA is excellent choice, probably the best even if I am biased to say so.
Hopefully this gets solved in next major update since we are moving to new version of programming toolset that should be more compatible with dll’s that might cause problems, but it requires rework of everything we have in PA so far. It is big undertaking that we started last year and it requires a lot of testing to make sure everything works properly.
