Untarring takes forever!

[me(who else?)]

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?

 

[Didou]

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 ?

 

[me(who else?)]

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)

 

[MYOB]

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.

 

[RealBlackStuff]

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?

 

[Mictlantecuhtli]

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.

 

[me(who else?)]

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.

 

[MYOB]

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

 

[me(who else?)]

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.

 

[Nodsu]

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.

 

[me(who else?)]

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.