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I am creating a zip archive of one file, in 3 different ways:

  • zip -1 (least compression) --> 33.8kB
  • zip -9 (most compression) --> 32.3kB
  • archive manager (zip option) --> 26.1kB

Why is there such a big difference?

Related: I'm trying to automatically zip files in Python using the zipfile module, and its performance is comparable to that of zip, but I want its performance to be that of archive manager. However, I can find no documentation on what archive manager does exactly. It claims to use 'zip' but clearly the compression is better...

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    Is it an option for you to use another compression tool/method, for example xz, which usually provides better compression than zip?
    – sudodus
    May 9, 2018 at 13:33
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    You may check actual file type with file archive.zip. You can try to open archive with file-roller archive.zip and see its Properties (Type and Compression ratio).
    – N0rbert
    May 9, 2018 at 15:01
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    @N0rbert it stated that p7zip compression was used. Strangely enough if I try to select .7z in file-roller, the file gets even smaller, and the properties (as in: which algorithm was used with which parameters) are identical!
    – PDiracDelta
    May 12, 2018 at 18:05

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