Par on Win7 64 & multiprocessor

[BZB]

If you're using the default par2.exe with NMP for it's automatic post-processing, you're probably using the default par2.exe command line written by Peter Clements many years ago. As a base implementation, it's single threaded only but pretty much works on every version of Windows.

Before my switch to Win 64, I'd been happily using Churchsoft's par2cmdline under WinXP 32 to take advantage of multiple-core processors. After switching to Windows 7 64 bit, I found that this version intermittently would hang at the end of a par.

I switched to PHpar, which is stable and fast, but primarily optimised for dual core and par creation. It shares it's fast routines with repair so is still pretty good all around if you have a MMX processor, but doesn't do anything for 64 bit.

I have noticed that Churchsoft have just brought out a new version of par2cmdline with the updated Intel threading libraries. I'm testing it now to see if the hanging issue has been fixed, but this version seems to be very fast indeed.

So if you're fed up of twiddling your thumbs while NMP grinds through Par with the older version of par.exe, try one of the above versions to see if it can use all your cores and the 64bit-ness of your OS and CPU to speed things up. Just rename one of the above two new par command lines to par2.exe, and use it to replace the one in your NMP installation directory.

[BZB]

If anyone's interest, PHpar has been updated after a couple of years (linky above).