async-unzip 0.5.0

Async unzipping to prevent asyncio timeout errors and decrease the memory usage for bigger zip files

async-unzip

Asynchronous unzipping of big files with low memory usage in Python Helps with big zip files unpacking (memory usage + buffer_size could be changed). Also, prevents having Asyncio Timeout errors especially in case of many workers using same CPU cores.

Fully tested on Python 3.7 through 3.14.

By default the extractor schedules up to 4 concurrent workers. Tune concurrency via the max_workers argument:

asyncio.run(unzip('archive.zip', path='output', max_workers=8))

When uvloop is installed, the event loop policy switches automatically to leverage its faster reactor.

When python-isal or zlib-ng is installed, async-unzip automatically switches to their faster zlib-compatible decompressors; otherwise it falls back to the standard library zlib.

Benchmarks

Numbers below were captured on an Apple Silicon macOS Sonoma machine (ARM64). Each measurement extracts into a fresh temporary directory and averages three runs.

Synthetic archive (tests/test_files/fixture_gamma.zip, 23.7 MB, max_workers=4)

Backend	Avg seconds	Samples (s)
zlib	0.024	0.0265, 0.0242, 0.0218
zlib-ng	0.027	0.0282, 0.0265, 0.0277
python-isal	0.061	0.0653, 0.0642, 0.0522

Real dataset (external ZIP, ≈1.10 GB)

Backend	Max workers	Avg seconds	Samples (s)
zlib	1	8.59	8.63, 8.67, 8.49
zlib	2	8.44	8.49, 8.31, 8.51
zlib	4	8.42	8.32, 8.54, 8.40
zlib-ng	1	10.63	10.50, 11.24, 10.14
zlib-ng	2	11.66	12.25, 11.34, 11.38
zlib-ng	4	10.91	10.57, 11.65, 10.52
python-isal	1	20.38	20.43, 20.33, 20.39
python-isal	2	21.41	22.06, 20.36, 21.83
python-isal	4	21.26	22.03, 20.85, 20.89

The large archive is not part of this repository; download any similarly sized ZIP manually if you want to reproduce the numbers.

Synchronous zipfile.ZipFile.extractall() (same 1.10 GB dataset)

Backend	Avg seconds	Samples (s)
zlib	14.42	14.58, 14.53, 14.16
zlib-ng	14.94	14.98, 14.99, 14.83
python-isal	14.04	13.92, 14.24, 13.94

zipfile is single-threaded, so concurrency does not apply in this scenario.

From version 0.3.6 module doesn't require, but expects to have aiofile OR aiofiles to be installed for I/O operations. However, aiofile is recommended for linux, just don't forget to install libaio (libaio1) linux module (e.g., apt install -y libaio1 for debian)

from async_unzip.unzipper import unzip
import asyncio

asyncio.run(unzip('tests/test_files/fixture_beta.zip', path='some_dir'))