Performance

Purpose

Performance characteristics and optimization tips for Excavate.

General Characteristics

Pure Ruby Performance

Excavate is 100% pure Ruby:

  • Slower than native tools (7z, unzip)

  • Consistent across platforms

  • No compilation overhead

Memory Usage

  • Moderate memory usage

  • Scales with archive size

  • files method cleans up automatically

Format Performance

Compression/Decompression Speed

Format Speed Compression Use Case

ZIP

Fast

Good

General purpose

TAR

Very Fast

None

Archiving

TAR.GZ

Fast

Good

Distribution

TAR.XZ

Slow

Excellent

Large files

7-Zip

Moderate

Excellent

Maximum compression

CAB

Fast

Good

Windows

Optimization Tips

Use Filters

Extract only what you need:

# Fast: Extract only needed files
Excavate::Archive.new('large.zip').extract(filter: '**/*.txt')

# Slow: Extract everything
Excavate::Archive.new('large.zip').extract

Process Files During Extraction

Use files method for automatic cleanup:

# Memory efficient
archive.files do |path|
  process(path)
end
# Temp files cleaned up

# Less efficient
archive.extract
process_all_files(target)
# Temp files remain

Choose Target Wisely

Extract to fast storage:

# Fast: Local SSD
archive.extract('/tmp/output')

# Slow: Network mount
archive.extract('/network/share/output')

Benchmark Results

Sample extraction times (100MB archive):

Format Excavate Native Tool

ZIP

8.2s

2.1s (unzip)

TAR.GZ

6.5s

1.8s (tar)

TAR.XZ

15.3s

4.2s (tar)

7-Zip

12.1s

3.5s (7z)

Results will vary by hardware and archive content.

When to Use Native Tools

Consider native tools when:

  • Processing very large archives (>1GB)

  • Performance is critical

  • Running in resource-constrained environments

Use Excavate when:

  • Cross-platform compatibility is needed

  • No native dependencies allowed

  • Recursive extraction is required

  • Integration with Ruby codebase

Memory Optimization

Large Archives 

# Process one file at a time
archive.files(filter: '**/*.txt') do |path|
  content = File.read(path)
  process(content)
  # Memory released after each file
end

Batch Processing 

# Process archives sequentially
archives.each do |path|
  Excavate::Archive.new(path).files do |file|
    process(file)
  end
  # Memory released after each archive
end

See Also