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I uses RAR since it was released a decade ago perhaps. However it is good for desktop applications I just found that on server where I need to compress a lot of text files every weekend it takes ages.

I looked into CPU usage and RAR takes around 15% of total CPU time. Nothing else is running alongside.

I have Xeon 8 threads (4 HT cores) and Windows 2008 R2.

Is there a compression software which zips no worse than RAR with option Best and takes advantage of all cores and HT ?

Thanks

P.S. Also has to have x64 version

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On a single server, pigz is gzip compatible, which makes for trivial portability. It will use as many cores as you have, to compress file(s). I've found it quite useful, and significantly speeds up compression of a number of files. Usefully, pigz is installable directly from apt in Ubuntu 10.4.

Something else at a higher level that I have just seen today is Gnu Parallel that will run a program/script against multiple files either multiple times concurrently, and/or even more interestingly, on multiple machines. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OpaiGYxkSuQ is a video demo (part 1) of its use.

These are both unfortunately primarily *nix based tools, though they may also be available via Cygwin.

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Alister it is a little too bold to install whole Unix add-on to run someone's favorite tools which used 20 min out of 24*7. – Bobb Jul 24 '10 at 16:06
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Ok. I found the benchmark for many formats. It seems Winrar beats 7Zip on Best. And 7Zip with LZMA2 beats Winrar on Default...

So I am going to install 7Zip and compare it to Winrar side-by-side.

http://www.tomshardware.co.uk/archive-zip-compression,review-31831-8.html

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7Zip beats them all, you can use Ultra Compression and use the zip format. Or if your bizz accepts it you can use .7z format, like microsoft uses to decompress silverlight and make its download smaller. – Gabriel Guimarães Nov 9 '10 at 12:26
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