Multithreaded Gzip and/or Tar

[Edcrosbys]

I'm being impatient and would like tar and gzip to use more that one processor each. Anyone know of a multithreaded version, or patch out there? I'm running it on HP and Solaris machine and I am using the Gnu Tar.

Thanks,
Eric

 

[Annihilannic]

Because you're processing one stream of data it doesn't lend itself well to multithreading; can you break the job down into smaller parts and run them in parallel? Annihilannic.

 

[Edcrosbys]

That's what I'm currently doing. I have 7 tar.gz files and I'm currently doing 7 simultaneous gunzip -c file.tar.gz |tar -xvf - . I just wanted to know if I could speed it up even more b/c it looks like the bottleneck is still the CPU.

Thanks

 

[Annihilannic]

Unless you've got very slow disks with (de)compression the bottleneck will probably always be the CPU. How many CPUs have you got to play with anyway?

If you have 7 or more I don't think you can expect to make it quicker. Annihilannic.