phantom@eng.umd.edu (Scott S. Perry) (04/02/91)
Last night I did several comparisons between LHA 2.11, ARJ 1.10, and Pkzip 1.10. In general ARJ and LHA produced very similar sized archives, within 100 bytes for 160K or so archives. They both beat Pkzip by 5-10%. In terms of speed, as you might expect, Pkzip usually beat ARJ and LHA significantly, but in one case, LHA beat Pkzip (I think 35 vs. 40 seconds). Arj was always in last place by a lot. The data I used was a combination of text and executables, with three different sets of data. This was on an AT at 10 Mhz. I used the default compression method in all tests. Although this information would imply that either Pkzip or LHA would be the best choice based on whether speed or size is your goal, it's worth mentioning that ARJ is very flexable, and has a lot of options the others don't. It may be quite possible to get better performance out of ARJ by using different parameters. Arj can be told to sacrifice some size for speed. Scott