by Martin Brinkmann on December 31, 2018 in Software – Last Update: December 31, 2018 – 3 comments
The developer of the open source file archiver 7-Zip, Igor Pavlov, released 7-Zip 18.06 yesterday to the stable channel.
The new version of the file archiver is the third and final release of 2018; check out our reviews of 7-Zip 18.01 and 7-Zip 18.05 for a full rundown on changes in 2018.
The new version of 7-Zip is available as a download for Windows and other supported operating systems on the official website. Existing installations of 7-Zip can be upgraded to the new version by installing 7-Zip 18.06 over the existing installation.
Windows users who prefer portable software can download a portable copy of the file archiver instead.
7-Zip 18.06
The official changelog lists the following changes and improvements.
- The speed for LZMA/LZMA2 compressing was increased by 3-10%,
and there are minor changes in compression ratio. - Some bugs were fixed.
- The bug in 7-Zip 18.02-18.05 was fixed: there was memory leak in xz decoder.
- 7-Zip 18.02-18.05 used only one CPU thread for bz2 archive creation.
The two main new features in 7-Zip 18.06 are compression performance improvements for the LZMA and LZMA2 compression formats, and the fixing of a memory leak in the xz decoder.
Igor Pavlov describes the performance improvements in the following way:
There is some prefetching for memory access that can provide faster match finding for LZ part. And there are some additional speed optimizations in optimal LZ parsing code.
Also the size of LZMA2 chunk in compressed form is smaller now:
it’s 48 KiB instead of 56 KiB in previous versions of LZMA2 encoder.
Closing Words
7-Zip users who work with the mentioned formats will benefit from the upgrade; it is unclear which bugs are fixed besides that. I did not run into any issues running 7-Tip 18.06 on a Windows 10 Pro version 1809 system.
I still prefer the file archiver Bandizip over other archiving solutions such as 7-Zip or WinRAR.
Now You: do you use 7-Zip or another file archiver?