After reading this comparison of WinRAR and 7-Zip, I stated that I should look into RARing files. And I did. I installed WinRAR and tested it against 7-Zip. Here’s the results

The folder I zipped was my 341 MB Apache folder for my test server that I run on this computer for development. It contains the Apache applications, PHP applications, images, PHP scripts, HTML files, some text files, and some video. I chose it solely because I needed to back it up, but it does have nice file diversity. =P Compression was done on my laptop, with its 1.3 GHz Celeron and 1.25 GB of RAM

WinRar

RAM Used: 62 MB
CPU Used: Used all free CPU.
Time Elapsed: 12:54
Compressed Size: 306,408 KB (299 MB)
Not much to say here, it compressed, nothing notable happened.

I did two tests for 7-Zip because as stated in the comments in that article, 7-Zip Ultra is rediculously RAM-eating.

7-Zip Ultra

RAM Used: 528 MB
CPU Used: Fluctuated, but usually used all free CPU.
Time Elapsed: 13:30
Compressed Size: 305,356 KB (298 MB)
So, for about 30 seconds extra and a lot of RAM, you too can save 1 MB of space! 7-Zip did warn me that it’d need 510 MB, so it’s calculations there worked.

7-Zip Maximum

RAM Used: 191 MB
CPU Used: Around 75%
Time Elapsed: 10:30
Compressed Size: 306,041 KB (298 MB)
Overall, I think this one did best. It beat the other two tests in time by a lot, and was only 700 KB larger than Ultra for less than half the RAM.

So, as soon as I actually release the new version of my portfolio, this will definately be going in the reviews section. =P