Re: tar block question

["Mag Gam" <magawake@gmail.com>]

Thanks Dave.

So, what do you recommend for such an annoyance? rsync takes a while
for me. But I rather I have 1 large tar file and untar as needed.



On Sun, Sep 14, 2008 at 3:16 PM, David Fox <dfox94085@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, Sep 14, 2008 at 10:03 AM, Mag Gam <magawake@gmail.com> wrote:
>> I have to tar up many small files. I have over 30k files in a
>> directory. What is the best way to do this? If I tar it its taking a
>> long time but from what I have been reading if I increase my blocksize
>
> Just did a test on a similar-sized directory ( my old mail dir, about
> 30K in small files). Adding a blocking factor does not seem to speed
> things up that quickly, and I think I'm getting the speed up from the
> disk cache, although I did a sync to see if that would make a
> difference. Still, I get a little bit of a speed up, but I don't think
> it is very significant. Also, IIRC, blocking factors are mostly for
> tapes rather than regular files. System is a 64bit dual core AMD with
> ubuntu hardy with all updates applied, and the disk is a 500 gb
> western digital sata/3.0 gbps model.
>
> Here's a (few) test runs:
>
> fox@newbox:~/.Mail/temp$ time tar -cf foo.tar ~/.Mail/temp/inbox/*
> tar: Removing leading `/' from member names
>
> real    0m7.736s
> user    0m1.412s
> sys     0m1.516s
> dfox@newbox:~/.Mail/temp$ ls -l foo.tar
> -rw-r--r-- 1 dfox dfox 166932480 2008-09-14 12:10 foo.tar
> dfox@newbox:~/.Mail/temp$ rm -f foo.tar
> dfox@newbox:~/.Mail/temp$ time tar -cf foo.tar -b 200 ~/.Mail/temp/inbox/*
> tar: Removing leading `/' from member names
>
> real    0m5.786s
> user    0m1.396s
> sys     0m1.544s
> dfox@newbox:~/.Mail/temp$ time tar -cf foo.tar -b 200 ~/.Mail/temp/inbox/*
>
> dfox@newbox:~/.Mail/temp$ ls -l foo*
> -rw-r--r-- 1 dfox dfox 167014400 2008-09-14 12:11 foo.tar
> dfox@newbox:~/.Mail/temp$ rm -f foo.tar
> dfox@newbox:~/.Mail/temp$ sync
> dfox@newbox:~/.Mail/temp$ time tar -cf foo.tar -b 2000 ~/.Mail/temp/inbox/*
> tar: Removing leading `/' from member names
>
> real    0m3.675s
> user    0m1.248s
> sys     0m0.852s
> dfox@newbox:~/.Mail/temp$ ls inbox/* | wc -l
> 30269
>
>
> --
> To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-REQUEST@lists.debian.org
> with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmaster@lists.debian.org
>
>