My Evaluation of Compression Software
March 5, 1993
by Stephen Balbach
[email protected]



With all the different software compression packages available I
decided to do a side by side comparison of how well each performs.
This is NOT a review of features, useability or speed, but pure
and simple, how well does it compress?


Program Version Switch Used
------- ------- -----------------------------
LHARC 2.13
ARJ 2.10 -t1 -jh65500 [text file only]
PKZIP 2.04G -ex [maximum]
Squeeze 1.08.3 -q -Z3 [maximum?]
HA 0.98 a21 [maximum]
(HA098.ZIP)



Large Text File: 451,223 bytes
---------------------------------------------------

LHA 191,262 %57.6 (percentage compressed)
ARJ 181,317 59.3
ZIP 176,355 60.9
SQZ 175,180 61.1
HA 132,146 70.7



Large Binary File: 783,035 bytes [FRACTINT.EXE]
---------------------------------------------------

LHA 374,215 %52.2
ARJ 365,088 53.3
ZIP 357,405 54.3
SQZ 356,526 54.4
HA 330,517 57.7


Binary File Mix: 4,068,097 bytes [Word Perfect 5.1]
---------------------------------------------------

LHA 2,291,385 %43.7
ARJ 2,252,983 44.6
ZIP 2,223,470 45.3
SQZ 2,220,897 45.4
HA 2,123,905 47.8


Overall: 5,302,355
---------------------------------------------------

LHA 2,856,862 %46.1
ARJ 2,799,388 47.2
ZIP 2,757,230 47.99
SQZ 2,752,603 48.02
HA 2,586,568 51.2



NOTE: This test does not measure speed. At first glance HA is the
winner but to un-HA WP51.HA on a 486 DX2 66 took 11 minutes while the
compression took more than twice that. While HA is good for archival
purposes or large modem transfers, ZIP is still the best bet for
speed vs. size I have been informed by the author of HA that he
hopes to improve the speed of HA by perhaps %50 by Sept. 93'.

OF INTEREST: SQZ and ZIP go head to head with SQZ pulling out just
3/10ths of 1 percent in the overall test. HA literally CRUSHES text
files almost %10 more than ZIP, and pretty fast too using the a2
method.

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Every compression program mentioned, PKZIP, ARJ, LHARC, Squeeze, HA
is copyright (c) by its authors and this author makes no guarantee to
the accuracy of this information.