Here is another update about ZipGenius X development. This time will focus on archive loading times and we’ve made ready a video for you on our YouTube Channel.

One of weakest point of ZipGenius 6 was loading an archive with several thousands of files inside because the app uses to preload the entire content in order to make archive browsing smoother: while this was a good approach for archives with few files inside – no matter what ther individual size is – the same was a truly bad approach to highly populated archives.

We reasoned about how we could improve this behaviour within ZipGenius X and we made possible to preload such archives in less time than with ZG 6, because we implemented a different algorithm. Also, switching from Delphi to C# through Visual Studio allowed us to get better general performances. Just a side note: ZipGenius X is being developed as a WindowsApps SDK / WinUI 3 application so that it can get any benefit from this modern approach to software design and development.

While we improved the preloading algorithm, we tried to implement a truly different approach, one that places exactly on the opposite side of what we have done up until now: we tried to preload just the folders structure of an archive and make contents available only when the user opens a folder. This method implies that the app must access the archive each time a folder is requested but we noticed that this doesn’t impact so much on general performances; in fact it’s better to load a group of files when needed than preloading thousands of files at once and upon starting.

The video we made states it clearly: the current approach is by far the better we could think of.

Enjoy the video below.