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I have a zip file that contains 200mb of data, compressed to an 80mb .ZIP file. Basically it's a website with thousands of files, including code and images, no video.

The file was zipped on a linux machine running red hat es6. Took less than 5 seconds to zip it.

The linux box can unzip this archive in about 1 sec.

My mac pro with dual quad core xeon processors and 12GB RAM (much more horsepower than the linux box) takes anywhere from 10 minutes to over an hour, depending what program I use to unzip the file, including terminal / command line. I am running OSX 10.7.5

Why does OSX have trouble unzipping this file, and is it possible to get similar performance as linux when dealing with file compression/decompression ?

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  • I'd need a lot more information to debug this, like the details of the file hierarchy (lots of symlinks? hard links? sparse files?), exactly how it was compressed, and which tools and options you tried on the Mac, and how long they took. It would also be interesting to know if the uncompressed results on the Mac are the same size as the original data or much bigger or smaller. Also, why are you still on an OS from years ago when 10.9 is free? Does 10.9 show the problem?
    – Spiff
    Dec 31, 2013 at 22:54
  • Hey spiff, no links, just php, js, jpg, png, and css files. Actually does not matter what zip file I work with, it's slow. Tried stuffit, unarchiver, command line unzip, an app called iZip, finally ended up getting app called The Archive Browser to work the best (about 5 minutes). No desire to update OSX yet. What's really interesting is how, using the command line, decompressing starts quick and then slows down the farther into the archive it progresses, until it's going one file at a time every half second or so. Also interesting that it only uses one processor core.
    – lilbiscuit
    Jan 1, 2014 at 14:58

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