Zip utility alternatives and curious about the built in zip utility speed.

[neomorpheus]

Hello.

I recently got a Mac Studio M4 and since its been a while since I had a Mac, I have missed many news about several tools.

One particular sample is the built in Zip utility.

I created a Zip file to do some transfer tests and the file is around 60 GB and its made of several different types of files.

I found interesting that the built in utility took almost 20 minutes to compress those files.

Wondering why and also, would it be better using another utility?

Are Keka and Unarchiver around?

If yes, would they be better?

Are they 100% free or need to pay to unlock their full functionality?

 

[MarkC426]

I use Unarchiver (App Store), works great.
If you’re transferring files of that size, I would just use wetransfer or similar.

What was the original size of the 60GB test?

 

[neomorpheus]

f you’re transferring files of that size, I would just use wetransfer or similar.

Funny enough, I just found out that there is a version of Teracopy for Mac and it works great for file transfer.

What was the original size of the 60GB test?

68.2 and it was compressed to 60.21.

 

[MarkC426]

68.2 and it was compressed to 60.21.

So it’s more of a package, than compression….

 

[Bigwaff]

I created a Zip file to do some transfer tests and the file is around 60 GB and its made of several different types of files.

I found interesting that the built in utility took almost 20 minutes to compress those files.

Wondering why and also, would it be better using another utility?

Observing the same as @MarkC426. Looks like your test files are not conducive for compression speed testing. Try your test with 68GB of text files and report back how long and how much smaller the compressed archive is.

Compressing data and archiving files are two very different activities. Try tar and pigz and marvel at the speed and efficiency. Also, archiving and compressing is only half the performance consideration. Don't forget about decompressing and unarchiving

How to use Pigz with Tar

So I am using pigz in tar with tar --use-compress-program=pigz and this works but it doesn't use all of my processors, and I'd like to make sure it's recursive (-r) and using (-9 compression level...

stackoverflow.com

 

[neomorpheus]

Thanks.

I simply needed a big file to test and noticed the "slowness" when I grabbed those files to zip them and make one huge file.

I noted that the CPU wasnt really taxed and as I said, it took almost 20 minutes to create that zip file from those 60 something gigs.

 

[Basic75]

You can try any number of compression utilities, and with different settings, in the shell, gzip, bzip2, xz, etc, to find the trade-off between compression ratio and speed that you like best. Not sure whether any of them are multi-threaded though.