BENCHMARKS

The benchmarks were performed on the following setup:

   Amiga 3000/25
   35 MHz 68040 Accelerator
   8 Megabytes of 60 ns FAST RAM
   4 Megabytes of 80 ns FAST RAM
   2 Megabytes of CHIP RAM

The following programs were benchmarked; LZX, LhA, Shrink, and InfoZip.
Details on the programs are as follows:

   Program    Version  Comments
   =========  =======  ===========
   LZX       *1.20     Best compression of all, very fast
   LhA       *1.38e    Poor compression, but very fast
   Shrink     1.1      Excellent compression, but very very slow
   InfoZip    2.0.1    Good compression, slow, but portable

* The evaluation version of LZX 1.20 for the 68040/68060 was used
* The evaluation version of LhA 1.38 was used.  Since only a 68000 version
  of LhA is provided for evaluation, that was used.

All tests were performed in the RAM: drive, and all programs and files were
loaded into RAM: beforehand.

Two sets of tests were run; a single file test, and a multiple file test.
As one might guess, the single file test involves compressing only a single
file; while this nullifies the effect of LZX's file merging capability, the
results clearly demonstrate that LZX, even on single files, is far superior to
all other compression programs on the Amiga.

The multiple file test involves compressing many files at once.  Here,
LZX's file merging capability allows it to compress data far more effectively
than the other programs.

One interesting result of note is borne out; not only does LZX compress
better than all other Amiga archivers, but it also decompresses faster, and,
in many cases, compresses faster!

  Single File Test  
 Multiple File Test