Rar7z - Notes after it has been put to use

Not too long ago I posted a coldfusion component to handle compression for rar and 7z.  Here is a report from the first time using it.

For reference, here is the important info:

Download version 1.0 -- lib_rar7z_cfc_v100.zip

This is of course released as-is no warranty, no support, blah blah, and eventually if people like this, I will officially make it open source.  Its a small piece of code, so who knows how useful it will be.

There are a few sample pieces of code to help figure out how to use is.  It is relatively easy:

Compress a file:

<cfinvoke component="lib.rar7z" method="compressFile" returnvariable="compressFile">
    <cfinvokeargument name="SrcPathAndFile" value="#ExpandPath(".")#\myfile.dat">
    <cfinvokeargument name="ArchivePathAndFile" value="#ExpandPath(".")#\myfile.rar">
    <cfinvokeargument name="VolumeSize" value="3500">
    <cfinvokeargument name="Timeout" value="90">
    <cfinvokeargument name="Engine" value="rar">
</cfinvoke>

List an archive's contents:

<cfinvoke component="lib.rar7z" method="listContents" returnvariable="listContents">
    <cfinvokeargument name="ArchivePathAndFile" value="#ExpandPath(".")#\myfile.rar">
    <cfinvokeargument name="Timeout" value="90">
    <cfinvokeargument name="Engine" value="rar">
</cfinvoke>

Extract files from an archive:

<cfinvoke component="lib.rar7z" method="extractArchive" returnvariable="extractArchive">
    <cfinvokeargument name="ArchivePathAndFile" value="#ExpandPath(".")#\myfile.rar">
    <cfinvokeargument name="OutputDir" value="#ExpandPath("./extract")#">
    <cfinvokeargument name="Timeout" value="90">
    <cfinvokeargument name="Engine" value="rar">
</cfinvoke>

I initially tried using the component with the "rar" engine, which maps to a 16-bit dos program called "rar.exe."  This didn't work out for me since it apparently only supports 8.3 filenames, and I needed support for long filenames. 

Second, I used the 7-zip executable "7za.exe" which is the command-line version of the 7z tools.  This supported long file names without any problem, and is behaving the way I expected.

The part I didn't expect was just how long it takes to compress a file.  I compressed an 80M database dump file using 7z, and it took 5-10 minutes...  this is running on a machine with 4 P4 hyyperthreaded processors and 4G ram...  thats a LONG time.

So, moving forward, I would NOT recommend use of the "rar" engine, but rather stick to "7z" if you need support for long file names.  Also, if you are compressing large files, be sure to assign a long enough timeout to make sure that CF doesn't prematurely terminate the process.  Other than this, it worked great!  It did exactly what I expected the first time I put it in use.