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From: Peter_Gutmann@kcbbs.gen.nz (Peter Gutmann)
Newsgroups: comp.binaries.ibm.pc.d
Subject: Re: maximal compression utility sought
Message-ID: <1990Dec27.122635.1031@kcbbs>
Date: 27 Dec 90 12:26:35 GMT
Lines: 19
Organisation: Kappa Crucis Unix BBS, Auckland, New Zealand

I'm currently working on an archiver which which is supposed to outperform 
but ZIP and LHARC (and it does for all test data I can get my hands 
on - about 10MB of stuff).  If you aren't worried about SLOW compression 
you'll LOVE this program - it crawls :-).  Actually its not *that* bad 
(1/2 the speed of LHARC, 1/3 the speed of ZIP) and I hope to speed it 
up somewhat by rewriting the compressor in assembly language.  As to 
its compression, I won't make any claims here but it's not that much 
better than ZIP and LHARC.  In fact as far as compressors go ZIP and 
LHARC are pretty well as good as you can get - there are better compression 
schemes but they tend to need a Cray to run on.  In short you can (as 
fasr as I know) get slightly better compression than ZIP/LHARC at the 
cost of slow compression/decompression.

It is possible to do slightly better than ZIP and LHARC but if you want
significantly better performance you'll probably have to implement the code
yourself, and run it on a LARGE system......
 
Peter.