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WinRAR 3.51 only using 25% of CPU? Need a new program?

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stompah

Deep Pain Senior Member
Joined
Apr 16, 2001
Hey guys. I have WinRAR on my XP Pro machine and I notice its only using 25% of CPU power. System Idle Process eats the rest of it.

I do have my 555be running all four cores, but it seems like compressing 1.36g of stuff should be alot faster. Would a newer version of WinRAR solve my problem or would a different app work better?

Thanks
 
That's quite an old version you're using, so it might not support multithreading... I dunno when they added that feature. Or it could simply be that it's not enabled for whatever reason... check in the program settings, I know in 3.80 there's a check box under Options->Settings->General.
 
Even with the newest version and Multithreading, it doesn't use but 33% of my i7. I think it's limited to like 3 threads in my experience.
 
I rather 7z instead of winrar, I started to used a couple of months ago and it works perfectly
 
Looks like winrar was using all the cores, just 25% of them.

I do have 7z, compressed the same files, seemed quicker. But I walked away half way through and forgot to see how long it took and how much it compressed the files. I will redo it again tonight.

Thanks for the help guys.
 
Do the archives have a lot of directories? Older B-Tree based file systems like NTFS & HFS+ hiccup when given large nested directories.
 
could be your hard drive is the limiting factor in that it cant feed the cpu / winrar fast enough for it to need to use more cpu power.
 
Well it has to be winrar (or the version), 7z compressed it to same size in 1/4 of the time. At least it used around 50% of the CPU.
 
AVis are already compressed. As such there's not a ton that WinRar or 7Zip can do. Most of the CPU usage you're seeing should simply be the program scanning through bits of data it just passes along into the archive. Try compressing something thats not compressed like a large software installer.
 
I just installed 7zip, and it works a TON faster. Compresses to the same size in about a half hour less than WinRar (for a 13GB set of ISOs), and uses all of the threads to the max :D
 
I just installed 7zip, and it works a TON faster. Compresses to the same size in about a half hour less than WinRar (for a 13GB set of ISOs), and uses all of the threads to the max :D

yup... 7z pwns.... can compress into rar's 7z files and zip files... its so much lighter and less blotwareish its not even funny.
 
Neat! last time I used 7zip it was no faster but used about 5 times the system resources. Might have to give it another spin. (People said it was way faster back then but I could not tell any difference I had a winrar license so did not really care but mine is pretty outdated)

Will be interesting to see if I notice any speed change :)
 
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