Re: cpu usage for GTAR on alpha

[Joerg Schilling]

>From: Uncle George <address@hidden>

>i have a 160gig ide drive on my alpha. The drive is not terribly fast,
>but apparently neither is the tar program that is going through the
>992767 used inodes with 69gig disk space used.

>the program top shows that tar has used up some 224 minuts, thus far,
>with some 60megs of main memory.  cpu usage seems to be  in the range of
>77% to 90%. This is a 533mhz processor.

It is hard to tell what happened because your mail misses informaiton
that would allow to judge....

224 minutes real time?
224 minutes user cpu time?
224 minutes system cpu time?

Taking your numbers leads to an average file size of 73 kB which should
give you more than 5 MB/s backup speed.

>Is there some reason why i am suffering so ?
>Is there a remedy ( like an alternate sort algorithm ) ? for all the
>files that i think you are storing in kore?

GNU tar is faster than many tar implementations used to be in the 1980s
but from a today's view it is not optimized.

Did you try star?

ftp://ftp.fokus.gmd.de/pub/unix/star/alpha/

Note that if the time above is system time, things may have been caused 
by your OS. Just try star and compare.


Jörg

 EMail:address@hidden (home) Jörg Schilling D-13353 Berlin
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