Compressing small files increases archive size

[d-divita]

Select your issue type: (check at least one)

• Bug
• Question
• Suggestion
• Other (please describe):

Describe your issue:
When compressing small files, for example a bunch of small .txt files, the resulting archive is bigger than the files it contains.

Ways to Reproduce the issue (optional):

1. Create a .txt file with a few words in it (it will be some bytes in size)
2. Compress it via QArchive
3. The resulting archive is about 10KB (tested with ZipFormat, SevenZipFormat, TarFormat)

[antony-jr]

@d-divita do we have a baseline, like have you compared with Ark or any other archive tool, does it produce smaller archives than QArchive?

[antony-jr]

Also, we should try to compare QArchive with bsdtar (this is installed by default on all linux distro), the one that is included with libarchive.

Since I have no control over the compression algorithm, its all libarchive.

[d-divita]

Sorry I forgot to mention it, I'm on Windows 10/11. I compared it with the built-in zip compression and with 7zip.
Libarchive is the latest stable version, I've used the prebuilt binaries for Windows.

[antony-jr]

Let me investigate this more.