# Performance

#### ZIP Format

Compression ratio results are very dependent upon the data used for the tests. We compared 7-Zip with some of the leading commercial archivers: PKZIP 2.04g, WinZip 7.0.

FILE SET: The Canterbury Corpus (11 files totaling 2,810,784 bytes, popular file set used to compression rates).

Archiver | Compressed size | Ratio
--- | --- | ---
7-Zip (zip format) | 676284 | 100%
PKZIP 2.04g -ex | 726047 | 107%
WinZip 7.0 (Max) | 731499 | 108%

#### 7z Format

7z is the new archive format, providing a high compression ratio.

FILE SET: The GIMP 1.2.4 for Windows after full installation (127 subfolders, 1304 files totaling 27,128,826 bytes). The GIMP is the GNU Image Manipulation Program. It can be downloaded from www.gimp.org.

Archiver | Compressed size | Ratio
--- | --- | ---
7-Zip (7z format) | 5445402 | 100%
WinRAR 3.10 | 6004155 | 110%
WinAce 2.3 | 6242424 | 115%
CABARC 1.0 | 6455327 | 119%
7-Zip (zip format) | 9461621 | 174%
PKZIP 2.50 | 9842800 | 181%

#### GZIP Format

7-Zip provides the best compression ratio for GZIP format. The compression ratio is equal to its compression ratio for ZIP format (above).

#### RAR Format

7-Zip provides superior decompression speed for RAR archives. For solid archives it decompresses only the minimum number of files needed. For example, consider a solid archive archive.rar containing 100000 files created by the command:
rar a archive.rar -s100 * -r
In this solid archive, each group of 100 files is compressed as one big file. To extract one file from that archive, 7-Zip will decompress (in memory) only some files from one group. As a result, 7-Zip can provide the combined advantages of solid compression and high speed of decompression.