The pack has introduced a new file archiving format based on the SQLite library and the ZSTADD compression algorithm. The prototype, developed in Pascal and released under the Apache 2.0 license, outperformed popular archives in terms of speed. The process involved reading data, compressing using the libzstdd library, and implementing SQL operations to store data in an SQLite database.
In a test where a directory containing 81 thousand files totaling 1.25 GB was compressed, Pack completed the operation in just 1.3 seconds, while the ZIP utility took 146 seconds. Pack was also more efficient in terms of file size, with 194 MB for Pack compared to 253 MB with ZIP. Additionally, Pack outperformed other archiving tools like TAR, RAR, and 7z in terms of speed and file size, with TAR.GZ at 214 MB, RAR at 235 MB, and 7Z at 135 MB.
It is worth noting that Pack also excelled in unpacking and random access to files, all while utilizing less RAM.
The impact of file caching on the test results was not mentioned, but it is believed that the slower performance of ZIP could be due to the order in which the tests were conducted, with ZIP being tested on a cold cache while the other tools were tested on a warm cache. Typically, Zstandard demonstrates significantly higher compression and unpacking speeds compared to ZLIB, with a compression efficiency improvement of 10-15%.