7-Zip 18.05 update: performance improvements and security patch

7-Zip 18.05 is a new version of the popular open source archiving software for Microsoft's Windows operating system. The new version improves the performance of some decoding and compression operations, and includes a security patch in the RAR module.

There are no new features, however, in the new release.

Existing and new users can download the 32-bit or 64-bit version of 7-Zip 18.05 from the official project website over at Sourceforge.

The new version can be installed over the previous version to upgrade it. You can check the installed version with a click on Help > About 7-Zip in the program interface.

7-Zip 18.05

The new version of the archiving software improves the performance of some operations. Specifically, decoding performance and compression performance for LZMA and LZMA2 improved significantly.

The change notes list the following improvements:

• The speed for single-thread LZMA/LZMA2 decoding was increased by 30% in x64 version and by 3% in x86 version.
• 7-Zip now can use multi-threading for 7z/LZMA2 decoding, if there are multiple independent data chunks in LZMA2 stream.
• 7-Zip now can use multi-threading for xz decoding, if there are multiple blocks in xz stream.
• The speed for LZMA/LZMA2 compressing was increased by 8% for fastest/fast compression levels and by 3% for normal/maximum compression levels.

7-Zip 18.05 changes the large memory pages use on systems running Windows 10. The archive software won't use large pages on Windows 10 version 1709 (the Fall Creators Update) or earlier because of "some BUG with 'Large Pages' in Windows 10".

The change log highlights improvements in the zip, hfs and dmg code on top of that.

The new 7-Zip version fixes a security vulnerability in the Rar unpacking code. 7-Zip users who use the software to unpack RAR archives occasionally or regularly may want to upgrade to the latest version as soon as possible to protect the system against potential exploits targeting the vulnerability.

Closing Words

7-Zip updates seem to be released at a much faster pace recently which is a good thing. 7-Zip 18.05 is the second release this year after 7-Zip 18.01 was released in January 2018.