speeding up unrar?

[joshua]

hi... the unrar'ing of HD files still seems to be the biggest slowdown for my setups... I am on OS X... I did a little research and it seems I should have yenc-0.3 installed... any way to ensure i do... and anything else i should be / could be doing?

thanks!

[shypike]

unrar is a third-party tool over which we have no influence (we just include it).
We will upgrade to the latest version (4.0) in the next release.
It's reported to be a bit faster.
yEnc has nothing to do with it.

[sander]

hi... the unrar'ing of HD files still seems to be the biggest slowdown for my setups... I am on OS X... I did a little research and it seems I should have yenc-0.3 installed... any way to ensure i do... and anything else i should be / could be doing?

thanks!

FWIW: In my experience, unrar is only relatively slow if your Internet/News connection is very fast and your CPU is slow. On my DSL conneciton of 33 Mbps and my Core i3 processor, the unrar takes 10 times less time than the download itself.

So what are your line and CPU specs?

[joshua]

shypike: - thanks - looking forward to the upgrade and any betas...

sander:
25/25 up and down for speed. fios.
MacMini core 7 2.0ghz
it used to be a lot slower on my older Core2Duo mini

[sander]

So, what is the timing on your downloads? If you click on a download in the History overview, you'll get the details. Here's an example of a DVD5 I downloaded:

Path /home/sander/Downloads/complete/bbb009.M4E.DVD5
Download Downloaded in 30 minutes 3 seconds at an average of 2.5 MB/s
Repair [bbb (2009).M4E.DVD5] Quick Check OK
Unpack [bbb (2009).M4E.DVD5] Unpacked 73 files/folders in 3 minutes 2 seconds

So, in my case the unpacking (3 minutes) took 10 times less time than the download itself (30 minutes).

[heddhunter]

unrar is almost entirely disk-bound. fastest way to speed it up is to use faster disks. if you can, separate the source drive from the destination drive (separate physical disks). i download to my SSD and unpack to a regular 7200rpm disk connected on firewire-800. things that used to take 10 minutes when i had only a single internal laptop drive now take 1 minute.

[joshua]

unrar is almost entirely disk-bound. fastest way to speed it up is to use faster disks. if you can, separate the source drive from the destination drive (separate physical disks). i download to my SSD and unpack to a regular 7200rpm disk connected on firewire-800. things that used to take 10 minutes when i had only a single internal laptop drive now take 1 minute.

Interesting and good to know. So basically incomplete and complete folders on different drives?

[heddhunter]

unrar is almost entirely disk-bound. fastest way to speed it up is to use faster disks. if you can, separate the source drive from the destination drive (separate physical disks). i download to my SSD and unpack to a regular 7200rpm disk connected on firewire-800. things that used to take 10 minutes when i had only a single internal laptop drive now take 1 minute.

Interesting and good to know. So basically incomplete and complete folders on different drives?

Precisely.

[chipped]

unrar is almost entirely disk-bound. fastest way to speed it up is to use faster disks. if you can, separate the source drive from the destination drive (separate physical disks). i download to my SSD and unpack to a regular 7200rpm disk connected on firewire-800. things that used to take 10 minutes when i had only a single internal laptop drive now take 1 minute.

Interesting and good to know. So basically incomplete and complete folders on different drives?

Precisely.

Only if you have a fast CPU. I use first gen Core i7 at 3.2GHz. Unrar goes at 99% no matter what, which is one of my cores since unrar is single threaded.

My incomplete directory is on an SSD and my complete on a RAID 10 array, 10 x 2TB.

The only way to speed it up is to have a CPU that is faster per core. Which is why I'm considering an upgrade to Haswell this year, maybe overlock to 4.4GHz (I use a Hackintosh).