Issues with UNRAR and possible solution

[mcklane]

Hi all,

this is my first post, please be gently ;-)

I installed xbian last week on my raspberry pi 1 for the first time and I am very pleased, everything looks good and fast.

However I have found a couple of issues around UNRAR (used to unpack fils for NZBGet):

1: I have installed it using xbian-config under the non free packages, however after it is installed the xbian-config still show the unrar package still uninstalled hence it cannot be removed from the tool but using apt-get.
2: the version instaled is 4.1 and it is unbelievably slow : using iotop and top i can see that the reason for being slow is not the disk or even the CPU (only 5% utilised) so i am not sure what the issues is.

Hence i unistalled the package and installed a newer version with these commands:
wget http://sourceforge.net/projects/bananapi/files/unrar_5.2.6-1.arm6_armhf.deb
sudo dpkg -i unrar_5.2.6-1.arm6_armhf.deb

This new version is much faster, I would say around 3 times faster. There is a small increase in CPU utilization but the read and write on the disk is now around 2MB/s instead of 400KB/s with the older version.

I hope this is helpful to someone, I am keen to get hear about other possible optimizations as the unpacking is still quite slow; I suppose if other users agree it would be good to include in the list of packages available (replacing the old version).

Regards