What does Sabnzbd use to unpack files after download?

[smidley]

I couldn't find this info anywhere.  What does sab use to unrar files?  Thanks to whoever can answer this.

[Nemesis]

unrar.exe?

C:\Program Files (x86)\SABnzbd\win\unrar

[smidley]

In that case, is there any specific reason sab uses that?  If it used something like 7zip, it could use an x64 version.  Just wondering.

[shypike]

The 32 bit or 64bit version of unrar is used, depending on your OS.
We don't use 7zip because 95% of downloads consists of RAR files
and nothing beats the original unrar program.

[smidley]

That's true.  7zip does rar files too though, and it's open source and under current development.  I don't think UnRar is still being improved upon.

[shypike]

7zip does unrar poorly.
unrar has frequent new releases.
It is open source, although not fully free in the FOSS sense, but free to use and available for a large range of platforms.

[smidley]

Ahhh ok, thanks for the better explaination shypike   it sounds like you're on top of it.

[inpheaux]

Additionally, 7zip wouldn't really give us any benefit. Even x64 unrar doesn't give us much benefit, since file extracting is I/O bound not CPU bound.

[sl1000]

7Zip would support multithreading accoring to the internet, Unrar does not. it would be nice to use the full potential of a cpu, instead of only one thread...

[shypike]

Repeat:
"doesn't give us much benefit, since file extracting is I/O bound not CPU bound. "
The only difference would be that it waits faster for the disk

[sl1000]

I humbly disagree.

Sabnzbd is run on many nas systems. some of which have simple arm based or atom based multi threaded (or even multicore) cpu's. these are not very powerfull at all. In those cases often the cpu-thread is flooded before the underlying disk system is.