Microsoft boosts Windows 11 performance with latest update but users feel it's not enough

Earlier today, we published an article about a free app called CompactGUI that has been built on Microsoft's technology. The app seems to massively compress down used disc space on Windows 11/10 without any apparent performance loss.

Compression and archiving is something Microsoft made a big fuss about with Windows 11 23H2 and Neowin looked at the performance aspect of it to see how the native performance of the new File Explorer compared with other popular third-party solutions like WinRAR. While Windows 11 was much slower, it was good to see it in action.

That was back in August of 2023 and since then, the company has slowly released updates for the feature. This has continued, and the latest April non-security preview update (C-release) KB5055627 also brings a performance boost for the feature. The release notes says:

Improved the performance of extracting zipped files, particularly in the case where you’re unzipping a large number of small files.

A Redditor tested this and found that the update indeed improved the performance over the previous release. However, they were still disappointed not from the improvement itself but because of how far behind the native performance of File Explorer still is. And apparently, Defender also seems to make a big dent.

The user IridiumIO notes:

With defender enabled, we can see a 10% improvement in extraction speed (from 333s to 303s), but that pales in comparison to the overall hit that Realtime Protection causes, with a 35% speed improvement just by turning it off.

 

But then you compare the comparative performance hit with running 7Zip, or even by just using the Expand-Archive command from Powershell. Explorer is ridiculously slow by comparison, but that's pretty old news.

The user further discusses the point about PowerShell with a bit of a rant:

What annoys me is they've clearly done some work to speed it up, but can't go the whole way and scrap the XP-era processing they're still using under the hood.

 

...

 

They've added RAR and 7Z support, but that's basically glued on top of the old system and next to useless. They have a functional archive manager already on their system in Powershell - sure it's not as good as 7Zip, but it's miles ahead of Explorer's implementation. Why not just use that?

The Redditor IridiumIO is the same person who has created the CompactGUI app we linked to up top, so he certainly has some authority on the topic.

Interestingly, they also seemed to have uncovered another potential problem with File Explorer that could be something that Microsoft can look into:

I did notice something else that's interesting. I did all the above tests in the "Downloads" folder of my user account, but moving the archive to the root of the C:/ drive before extracting does lead to another ~10% improvement in speed. I suspect (and hope I am wrong) that this is due to explorer checking the entire path structure for each file as it is extracted, which leads to the extra slowdown.

 

I'd guess this means that for deeper nested directories the slowdown gets even worse, but I haven't checked this.

There is a caveat here, though. The user does note later that it's possible there could be further improvements which may not have been reflected as a consequence of A/B testing. They write:

Apparently (due to A/B testing) my update doesn’t actually include the improvements to archive extraction, and the speed boost is supposed to be much more than what I got.

 

...

 

Hopefully this means that when the fix rolls out properly the results will be closer to at least Powershell’s speed if not 7zip.

Knowing Windows, something like that is certainly possible. Tests have shown that Windows 11's performance can be inconsistent even in a controlled environment.

Do you think Microsoft is doing enough to improve the performance of Windows 11, especially certain aspects like File Explorer? Or do you feel there is much to be desired still? Let us know below!

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