The Best Archiver

[ZiNgA BuRgA]

In terms of pure compression, PAQ8PX/PAQ8KX is probably one of the best.  It's unusably slow however, and it's not "asynchronous" (that is, decompression is just as slow as compression).

7zip's LZMA and perhaps UHARC are probably the best compression for general usage (the latter doesn't have much support though).

ZIP (deflate) is "old" and can be beaten by most newer algorithms at pretty much anything.  LZMA usually beats RAR, but RAR will sometimes give better compression due to having more filters (in particular, media files such as .wav, where LZMA has no filter); for text, RAR seems to beat LZMA, but 7zip's PPMd beats RAR.

I usually compress my code here using 7zip's PPMd.

Comparison I did a while ago:

Quote:XThreads script v1.10 - uncompressed = 210,215 bytes

RAR - WinRAR 3.90
Best compression (solid) = 41,578 bytes

7z - 7-Zip 9.13 beta
LZMA (solid) 128MB dict, 64 word size, 1 thread = 47,483 bytes
LZMA2 (solid) 128MB dict, 64 word size, 1 thread = 47,484 bytes
PPMd (solid) 256MB dict, 32 word size, 1 thread = 39,601 bytes

PAQ8
PAQ8KX Max compression = 30,432 bytes (took 1.9GB of RAM and 101 seconds to do the job)
PAQ8PF Max compression = 35,268 bytes (took 1.2GB of RAM and 2.7 seconds to do the job)