Comparing archives is slow

[Guest]

BC2's feature of being able to compare the contents of .zip's or .tar.gz's is handy, but for large archives it's extremely slow.

I've found it to be much faster to extract the archives into temporary directories and then compare those directories.

Would it be feasible for BC to use the temporary-directory method automatically?

[Chris]

Re: Comparing archives is slow

BC reads directly from archives instead of expanding them to a temp folder.

Changing this behavior probably won't make it into version 2.x of BC because it would be a pretty signifigant change and it would use much more temp space than BC currently uses.

[Dave_L]

Re: Comparing archives is slow

I don't suppose there's any other way of making archive file comparisions faster?

[Chris]

Re: Comparing archives is slow

BC's handling of .zip files is faster than its handling of .tar.gz, so using the zip format might help.

If you're running a real-time virus scanner, that might also contribute to the slowdown. I run McAffee on my own system, and it can add a noticable load to the system when it scans inside large archives.