Well, I hope I am posting this in the right forum. I was wondering if you tech-guys know if there is any difference in speed if: I am let's say extracting two 2gb archives file1.rar and file2.rar:

1. at the same time
2. one after another

I'd really like to know that, because I really love to multi-task but sometimes I get the feeling that things would go faster if I did one thing and then after the first one is completed, move on to another rar archive for example...

Thank you all for your answers!

This post has been edited by heavensounds: Mar 19 2008, 05:07 PM

Well, extracting both at the same time would slow down the extraction due to higher CPU usage, but they would both most likely finish at the same time. If you did them one after another, both would extract faster, but it would most likely take the same amount of time for both of them to extract, making the extraction time be X+X, which could be much longer than extracting them both at the same time. The first method would have the extraction time about the same for both of them. You also could give the extraction process higher priority, making it have more CPU power and letting it extract faster.

also minimizing one will make it slower than the other one.

i don't know if there are achiving programs who can use dual core's capability. if it can then there will be no difference.


and also winrar is not the best archive program out there. try 7-zip they can archive a little bit more.
and another thing you can make it an iso, .daa and such that will make it more smaller if you are doing it just to burn in a cd.

Thanks for the info guys! Well if I understood correctly, it is faster to extract both archives at the same time, but it will take almost all of my CPU! This is what I mostly do and as things get laggy I thought that that also slows down the unarchiving process, but I guess it only slows down other processes...

Yeah, as for dual core that would be great if it could use both..

Btw, I am using 7-zip and I really like it a lot more then winrar - it is better imo!

If you like winrar ane 7-zip, you could consider using ALZip - it's the program I use and it supports a variety of formats and compression speeds.

Well, I personally use UHARC or WINUHA for seriously file backups and stuff, but otherwise I use winRAR. The configuration is simple, and the archive can be compressed a lot.

I would personally think that archiving both at the same time would be faster, but some instances, archiving one after the other might be abit faster...