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

[Nachteule]

(23rd Jul, 2016 12:33 AM)mcklane Wrote:  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.

I suppose you're using XBian config GUI running under Kodi, right?
That package manager is still very buggy, I was working on it last 2 weeks and fixed a lot of issues, but did not release that version right now.

Quote: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).

Good idea I will do some tests and if I can confirm your results, I will put this version to our repo

[Nachteule]

You're right - an 8GB file to unrar took 44mins using v4.10 and 21mins using v5.21

Uploaded new unrar packages to our repo.

The unpack time using v5.21 seems to be identical described here

[mcklane]

Many thanks Nachteule.

when will the new package appear in the normal package list? I see the description for unrar still says version 1.4 in the packages section of the xbian config.

Thanks

(23rd Jul, 2016 07:50 AM)Nachteule Wrote:  You're right - an 8GB file to unrar took 44mins using v4.10 and 21mins using v5.21

Uploaded new unrar packages to our repo.

The unpack time using v5.21 seems to be identical described here

[Nachteule]

(7th Aug, 2016 08:36 PM)mcklane Wrote:  Many thanks Nachteule.

when will the new package appear in the normal package list? I see the description for unrar still says version 1.4 in the packages section of the xbian config.

This package is already there since Jul 22. Unfortunately package manager in xbian-config has some issues so you see older version (local cache is not synced correctly). I already fixed this but did not released this right now (got some health problems )

But anyway, I put my version to devel Repo. For getting it, please enable Devel repo, update your package list and install xbian-package-config-shell and xbian-package-config-xbmc (do not update all in update manager if you do not want to install Kodi Krypton or kernel 4.6)