Testing WinRAR 3.90 beta

I recently had to evaluate the preformance of the Rarsofts new beta of WinRAR.
WinRAR is a powerful GUI and CLI archiever that handles many archieve formats.
In order to test the preformance I installed WinRAR 3.80 as well as WinRAR 3.90beta1 (in both 32 and 64-bit versions).

Here is a light version of the PowerShell script I came up with (please adjust file paths and $source according to your own need):

Function Test-Rar {
    param ($winrar = "c:\Program Files (x86)\WinRAR\Rar.exe",
        $source = "d:\psref351.pdf",
        $target = "c:\test.rar",
        $testruns = 1)
    $version = & $winrar
    Write-Host "Test using: $winrar" -fore "green"
    Write-Host $version[1] -fore "green"
    for ($i = 1; $i -le $testruns; $i++){
        if (Test-Path $target) { del $target }
        $time = Measure-Command {& $winrar a $target $source}
        $sourcesize = (Get-ChildItem $source).length
        $targetsize = (Get-ChildItem $target).length
        $obj = New-Object Object
        $obj | Add-Member Noteproperty Testrun -value $i
        $obj | Add-Member Noteproperty TimeInSeconds -value ([math]::round(($time.totalseconds), 2))
        $obj | Add-Member Noteproperty SourceByteSize -value $sourcesize
        $obj | Add-Member Noteproperty TargetByteSize -value $targetsize
        $obj | Add-Member Noteproperty CompressionPercent -value ([math]::round( (1-($targetsize / $sourcesize)) * 100,2))
        $obj
    }
}

The above function can be use in the following way:

Test-Rar -source "d:\psref351.pdf" -target "d:\test.rar"


However, I needed to run tests with several versions of WinRAR and compress rather large files. So I needed a small function to repeat the same test multipel times with different versions of WinRAR.

Function MultiTest {
    Param ($rarversions = "c:\Program Files (x86)\WinRAR\Rar.exe")
    foreach ($rarversion in $rarversions) {
        $result = Test-RAR -testruns 5 -winrar $rarversion
        $result
        $stat = $result | Measure-Object -Property TimeInSeconds -min -max -average
        $stat | Add-Member Noteproperty Executable -value $rarversion
        $stat
    }
}

Here is how to use the function:

$rarversions = "c:\Program Files (x86)\WinRAR\Rar.exe", "D:\wrar39b1\rar.exe", "D:\winrar-x64-39b1\rar.exe"
$result = MultiTest $rarversions
$result | Select Executable, Count, Average, Maximum, Minimum | ft -au


While this is not a preview of the new WinRAR version, my results indicate a decrease in the time required to create a .rar file in the 20-30% range. Most impressive indeed!