🚀 go-pugleaf

News flash from Muppet Labs:

With the long-awaited release of Stuffit Deluxe 3.0.1 we decided to run a 
series of test comparing it to Compact Pro 1.33.  We created three different 
archives:

1) A single 121k Microsoft Word 5.0 document.

2) Several Microsoft Excel 4.0 documents that totaled 572k.

3) A mixed collection of graphic files including quite a few PICTS.

The tests were run on a Macintosh Classic with 4MB of RAM, an Apple 40MB hard 
drive and a PLI 45MB SyQuest drive.  The System files, Stuffit Deluxe and 
Compact Pro were running off the internal hard drive and the archives were read 
from and saved to the SyQuest drive.  There was enough contiguous free space on 
the SyQuest drive so that fragmentation should not have been an issue.

Our results were as follows:

File Type       Stuffit Deluxe    Results     Compact Pro        Results
                Com      Decom                Com      Decom

121k MS Word    52 sec   10 sec   60%/50k     45 sec   14 sec    56%/53k

572k MS Excel   248 sec  58 sec   64%/203k    223 sec  68 sec    63%/206k

2894k Graphics  1297 sec 303 sec  25%/2157k   1080 sec 330 sec   20%/2297k

Overhead for a self-extracting archive is 16k for Stuffit Deluxe and 13k for 
Compact Pro.

In general, our test showed that Stuffit Deluxe 3.0.1 archives files into 
marginally smaller documents but the time needed to archive was slightly longer
than Compact Pro.

The big difference was in decompression time.  Stuffit Deluxe is remarkably 
faster than Compact Pro in this.  Don't try to uncompress a Compact Pro 
document with Stuffit Deluxe because it takes about 2.5 times as long as it 
takes using Compact Pro.

Stuffit Deluxe cannot uncompress a segmented Compact Pro document.

Stuffit Light 3.0.1 should provide similar results, if not faster (since the 
application is smaller).  It too extracts Compact Pro archives, and so is a 
good all-purpose solution.

Muppet Labs therefore recommends that power users everywhere switch immediately 
to Stuffit 3.0.1 (pick yer flavor).  It IS recommended that you retain Compact 
Pro for dealing with .cpt archives, but for new work, Stuffit is superior.

"It kicks Butt."


Muppet Labs is:

Michael Mitchell
Brian Combs
David Croley
Peter Dunlap
Ben Allums

(Muppet Labs is in no way affiliated with anyone or anything and is strictly a 
figment of our collective imaginations.)

(That means Aladdin didn't pay us for this but they are welcome to.  We just 
think Stuffit is much cooler.)



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:David Croley            : Texas... They got big long roads out there.  :
:ifab407@ccwf.utexas.edu :                                  - Chris Rea :
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