Aggregated Results

Compression Rate

Overall, WinRK was the champion at compressing the filesets. It had an average compression rate of 23.2%. It was 9% better at overall compression than its closest rival, SBC Archiver which had an average compression rate of 21.3%.

The poorest compressors overall, at default settings, were the trio of WinZip, gzip and ARJ32. They only had average compression rates of about 13%.

Compression Speed

However, gzip was the undisputed speed champion. It only took just over 121 seconds to completely process the complete fileset collection which weighed in at over 1.6GB. It was over a third faster than the runner-ups, ARJ32 and WinZip.

The other compressors were pretty slow at their normal compression settings. However, WinRK was extremely slow, compared to the others. It took almost 1.5 hours to compress the entire fileset collection.

Compression Efficiency

The compression efficiency rating is a simple way to evaluate the efficiency of each data compressor. This way, we can see which compressor can save the most space in the least time.

Please note that a higher efficiency rating does not mean the compressor is better. It just means the compressor has a better compression-to-speed ratio. A more efficient compressor is, of course, always more desirable than a less efficient one.

The most efficient data compressor for the aggregated results was gzip. Its super-fast compression speed, coupled with its average compression rate allowed it to become the undisputed overall efficiency champion. ARJ32 and WinZip were also very efficient compressors. They were more than twice as efficient as their nearest rivals, StuffIt and bzip2.

The other compressors may have been good at certain files, but overall, they were pretty inefficient. The most inefficient compressors overall was WinRK by a large margin . No matter how good it was at compressing files, its extremely slow compression speed totally killed its efficiency ratings.