I'm not sure if this is normal, but untarring a small > 100MB file takes a tremendous amount of time. This is on a 2.4Ghz Coppermine. It seems pretty insane...I don't know what's wrong.

Is there any way to speed this up?

I doubt you're using a coppermine CPU. They didn't go beyond 1GHz. As for the extraction problem, what amount of time are we talking about here ?

I can extract sources for the Linux kernel from a tar file in about 5/6 minutes. Is that the kind of time you get ?

It's a Celeron (Coppermine based). I mean it isn't finished after an hour for a 25 MB file. This seems unduly long (this is with tar -x, not graphical like file roller)

If its a Celeron over 1.6Ghz or so, its NetBurst Based - Willamette, Prescott, Northwood, etc are all NetBurst processes

Its NOT on Coppermine, or Tualtin, which is what replaced Coppermine. Coppermine was a P6 based process that was used for PIII's

Fastest Coppermine Celeron was 1.1Ghz.

Yours is Northwood-128 or Prescott-256 based.

According to your user-spec, you are doing this on a Toshiba laptop with mobile Celeron 2.2.
That laptop has only a 40GB harddisk. Could it be that it is nearly full?

Or are you talking about your Linux server with 233MHz processor and 64MB RAM?

Maybe DMA isn't enabled on that hdd, maybe the package is corrupted. I guess you're using ext3 filesystem? You can see what's going on with extraction by using 'v' parameter, for example tar zxfv package.tar.gz.

The HD is nowehere near full (this is the laptop). I don't use up 40 gigs as fast as you would think (I'm at 11Gigs). I'll try the v parameter.

A Celeron-M 2.2 couild be P6 based, but it'd be a Dolthan and not a Coppermine...

For whatever reason, when I watched the output, the tarring finished, but it didn't return to the prompt. I never got the reason for that, but the tarring was finishing and not returning to a prompt.

Perhaps you switched out of the tar process with ctrl+z and then swapped back with "fg"?

And FYI tar uses virtually no CPU since tar archives are not compressed. They are just concatenated files. If you were talking about uncopressing a tar.gz file then it is another matter.

No, I can actally gzip a 3 gig file in less than an hour. It's untarring it that won't finish! I tried this trick with a larger file, but it still got hung up.