Others Excessive Game extraction time...

[Lt.Marx]

Making my first post on this and probably on the wrong thread and ill apologize if thats the case.

So my issue is, why some of the games i download from F95zone takes something like a day or more to extract?...its not all games this happens with but just some and it dosent matter if the file size is small or big, but for whatever reason it just takes an ETERNITY to extract....like wtf is going!?

an example would be a game called Radiant Victorias v1.0.2

i could really use some help and advice here since im wondering if its a pc issue or something else entirely

 

[whowhawhy]

is your 7-zip up to date? are you using an overzealous antivirus? has your hdd been making dying noises lately?

 

[Winterfire]

If it is only some, it is likely they have set a higher compression rate. Higher compression = smaller size, more time to extract.
You can't do anything about it, other than getting a better pc or downloading elsewhere.

 

[whowhawhy]

If it is only some, it is likely they have set a higher compression rate.

even with those folded over 1000 times russian repacks that take forever to extract i wasn't getting more than a few hours of extraction time and that was years ago on a much weaker machine, but i've heard of some antivirus software throttling 7zip and windows' built-in extraction chocking on 7z files (which radiant victorias - less than 2 gb - here uses).

 

[Winterfire]

even with those folded over 1000 times russian repacks that take forever to extract i wasn't getting more than a few hours of extraction time and that was years ago on a much weaker machine, but i've heard of some antivirus software throttling 7zip and windows' built-in extraction chocking on 7z files (which radiant victorias - less than 2 gb - here uses).

few hours is way more than the time I pictured when he said "an eternity".

If the antivirus or hdd was the issue, he should have a slow extraction time with all the games he downloads. If it is only some of them,

NVM, after re-reading I noticed the " like a day or more to extract " which I had missed previously.
That definitely sounds like a highly compressed archive + antivirus. Try disabling your antivirus temporarily and see if it gets any faster.

 

[Lt.Marx]

so i tried turning off my antivirus and sadly no luck then i did something i usually never do like opening winrar and just choose a game i wanted to extract and to what folder to be extracted to....and it was done in a cinch!....what ive always been doing was just drag and drop the file from where my downloaded files were located from and then to my desktop, but clearly something has changed now hence my post...

 

[Winterfire]

so i tried turning off my antivirus and sadly no luck then i did something i usually never do like opening winrar and just choose a game i wanted to extract and to what folder to be extracted to....and it was done in a cinch!....what ive always been doing was just drag and drop the file from where my downloaded files were located from and then to my desktop, but clearly something has changed now hence my post...

Winrar is highly outdated, not saying it is the cause (with no antivirus it defaults back to having a weak machine and a high compression rate, although 24h+ is an insane number I've never seen), but I'd still switch over to 7zip.
At the very least, Winrar can fail to extract/corrupt some archives, so upgrading to 7zip is still a good thing to do even if it doesn't solve your current issue.

 

[Ashira13]

yeah, i have to agree with Winterfire here. i used winrar earlier, and had serious trouble extracting some "rar" archives, it took forever, but when i migrated to 7zip, the troubles went away. "superfast" extractions with and without antivirus on,

 

[whowhawhy]

i usually never do like opening winrar and just choose a game i wanted to extract and to what folder to be extracted to....

are you using drag-and-drop (like you do with moving files from one folder to another) to get the files out of archives normally?

that adds additional steps to the extraction process:

You must be registered to see the links

if you have multiple partitions (like drive c dedicated to the operating system and the rest of hdd space as drive d), that could mean at least the program having to later copy extracted files between partitions (it still shouldn't amount to anywhere close to the slowness you're geting, though).

 

[Lt.Marx]

are you using drag-and-drop (like you do with moving files from one folder to another) to get the files out of archives normally?

that adds additional steps to the extraction process:

You must be registered to see the links

if you have multiple partitions (like drive c dedicated to the operating system and the rest of hdd space as drive d), that could mean at least the program having to later copy extracted files between partitions (it still shouldn't amount to anywhere close to the slowness you're geting, though).

yeah thats basically what i have always been doing

 

[Lt.Marx]

Winrar is highly outdated, not saying it is the cause (with no antivirus it defaults back to having a weak machine and a high compression rate, although 24h+ is an insane number I've never seen), but I'd still switch over to 7zip.
At the very least, Winrar can fail to extract/corrupt some archives, so upgrading to 7zip is still a good thing to do even if it doesn't solve your current issue.

ill take your advice and switch to 7zip instead

 

[anne O'nymous]

NVM, after re-reading I noticed the " like a day or more to extract " which I had missed previously.
That definitely sounds like a highly compressed archive + antivirus.

With such high delay, it looks more like a RAM or/and hard drive issue.

Like someone said, usually when you hit the "uncompress" button, the archive content is stored in the "temp" directory, then moved (or copied for some software) to the destination one. How fast it will be fully depend on how fast the hard drive is, and how saturated are its cache and the OS cache.
If the files are copied to the destination directory, and they are on the same hard drive, that part can easily be as long as the uncompression itself on slow hard drive.

Plus, during the uncompression itself, a big part of the file need to be stored in RAM. Therefore, if the amount of free RAM is limited, Windows will have to rely on its cache file, moving part of the memory to the hard drive before it can let WinRAR/7zip/whatever actually starts to uncompress. Here again, how fast it will be depend on the hard drive and the related caches.
If it happen that the amount on RAM needed to uncompress the archive is bigger than the amount of RAM that can be freed through the cache file, a part of the archive will be put on the said cache file, adding many hard drive to/from RAM transfer, and so even more slowing down the whole process.
And, if on top of this he continue to use his computer, Windows will have to juggle with the RAM and the cache file, having tons of disk operation in top of the one due to the uncompression process.

Personally, I don't see another explanation. Even with a 20 years old CPU and WinRAR none optimized code, there's no reason to go lower than a 1GB/hour speed on big archives, and going this slow is already unlikely... Unless there's this RAM + hard drive issue.

 

[Winterfire]

With such high delay, it looks more like a RAM or/and hard drive issue.

Like someone said, usually when you hit the "uncompress" button, the archive content is stored in the "temp" directory, then moved (or copied for some software) to the destination one. How fast it will be fully depend on how fast the hard drive is, and how saturated are its cache and the OS cache.
If the files are copied to the destination directory, and they are on the same hard drive, that part can easily be as long as the uncompression itself on slow hard drive.

Plus, during the uncompression itself, a big part of the file need to be stored in RAM. Therefore, if the amount of free RAM is limited, Windows will have to rely on its cache file, moving part of the memory to the hard drive before it can let WinRAR/7zip/whatever actually starts to uncompress. Here again, how fast it will be depend on the hard drive and the related caches.
If it happen that the amount on RAM needed to uncompress the archive is bigger than the amount of RAM that can be freed through the cache file, a part of the archive will be put on the said cache file, adding many hard drive to/from RAM transfer, and so even more slowing down the whole process.
And, if on top of this he continue to use his computer, Windows will have to juggle with the RAM and the cache file, having tons of disk operation in top of the one due to the uncompression process.

Personally, I don't see another explanation. Even with a 20 years old CPU and WinRAR none optimized code, there's no reason to go lower than a 1GB/hour speed on big archives, and going this slow is already unlikely... Unless there's this RAM + hard drive issue.

But what about the other archives? He said it happens only with some

 

[anne O'nymous]

But what about the other archives? He said it happens only with some

It depend on the size, and probably optimization, of the dictionary.

To quickly summarize, compressed files are composed of sequences of bytes stored in a dictionary, while the entry index in that dictionary is store in the file. So, the string "ABCDEFGDEFGABC" would be compressed as 01020201, and have two entries in the dictionary, "ABC" and "DEFG". It's the reason why plain text files always have a high compression ratio, because it's a repetition of words. All the occurrence of a same word take only one entry in the dictionary, and if you use a dictionary with 65535 entries (16 bits), every word with more than two letters will become a two bytes value.
In reality compression algorithms are obviously more complex, but the said complexity is mostly on the way to find what byte chains have to be stored for an optimal compression, and possibly in the possibility to share the dictionary for the whole archive.

So, a game that have complex and really different images, will end with a poor compression ratio and small dictionaries. It will have less difficulties to fit in a saturated RAM. This while a game with more basic images that don't necessarily differ, like 2D games by example that tend to have large part of the same solid color and repetition of the same gradient, will have a higher compression ratio and bigger dictionaries. This will make it more difficult for it to fit in a saturated RAM.
Same if the game have a lot of complex and/or already compressed/encoded data. You can see it by example when you create an archive of archives. Most of the files have a really low compression ratio, because there's near to no pattern that still exist.

This mean that you weren't totally wrong when talking about the compression factor, except that it's more a question of compression ratio. But an archive with a low compression factor will also have necessarily smaller dictionaries, what will make them fit more easily in the RAM.