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Recently I’ve needed to compress the **** out of a various selection of files (binaries, text, etc) and been looking for the best method. I stumbled accross Maximum Compression’s ultimate test: http://www.maximumcompression.com/data/summary_mf.php

Their test is made up of a huge list of files as shown below:

Filetype(s) Description % of total # of files
TOC, MBX Eudora mailboxes 12.31 16
EXE, DLL, OCX, DRV Executables 10.99 35
TXT, RTF, DIC, LNG Text files in several languages 10.21 41
BMP, TIFF Bitmaps/TIF images 7.88 15
LOG Log files 6.34 6
HTM, PHP HTML files 6.13 19
DOC MS Word files 6.08 30
C, CPP, PAS, DCU Source Code 6.00 235
MDB, CSV Databases 4.26 7
HLP Windows Help files 4.23 7
CBF, CBG Precompressed chess-databases 3.55 2
WAV Wave soundfiles 3.45 9
XLS XLS Spreadsheets 2.41 16
PDF Adobe Acrobat document 1.59 6
TTF True Type Fonts 1.15 15
DEF Virus definition files 1.10 3
JPG, GIF Image files 0.53 9
CHM Precompressed help files 0.49 2
INI, INF INI files 0.42 10
Others DAT,JAR,M3D,SYS,PPT,MAP,WP,RLL,RIB.. 10.88 27

With this selection of files, they run 239 compression programs against it to pick out the best by time, ratio and more. I was expecting to see names like 7zip and bzip2 at the top of the list but was quite suprised to see unfamiliar names. The top 5 were:

  1. PAQ8P
  2. WinRK 3.0.3
  3. PAQ8JC
  4. PAQAR 4.5
  5. WinRK 3.0.3

What I like about the list is that they use the various switches available; for example running bzip2 -9 is a lot different to not having the -9. Check it out if you’re into that :D

Get the best compression ratio

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