[Gllug] unzip - slightly off topic

[Bruce Richardson]

On 8/23/01, 9:43:45 AM, "Paul Brazier" <pbrazier at cosmos-uk.co.uk> wrote 
regarding [Gllug] unzip - slightly off topic:


> Are there any known issues when unzipping very large files?

No, just the usual issues of OS and hardware struggling to deal with a 
load.

> We've get a nightly .zip file of about 0.25GB containing about 1.3GB of
> data in about 20 separate files.
> This should automatically unzip overnight, but fails occasionally and
> unpredictably.

Could be a fault in the formatting of the zip file (where is it generated 
from?)  But I'd say this was a system problem.  Some posiblities:

* Not enough resources (swapfile, free memory) to handle the file.  If 
you do it all in the same filesystem then you are copying a large file 
into a filesystem, creating an even larger file and in the process 
consuming a chunk of resources (and if the swapfile is on the same 
filesystem...)
* Bugs in the unzip program
* Conflict with some other intermittent process
* Hardware fault

> It's running on WinNT using PKzip at the moment :( but there were
> similar problems when it used to run on some Unix using gzip.

Is it the same machine?

> Or is the problem likely to be with the operating system (disk space,
> memory, etc) and not the compression utility used?

Reckon.

> Are there any websites discussing this issue?

If you do a search for sites discussing zips (and problems therewith) 
what you find may not be what you were looking for.

-- 

Bruce

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