Ubuntu

Tar/gzip causing system to slow to a crawl

Asked by Desi

Has anyone encountered severe slowdown of their system when using tar or gzip on their system?

I am experiencing extreme slowness with nothing else (I mean nothing) running on the system.
I can't even issue an ls command.

The size of all files in a directory totals about 31Gb of which one file is 30Gb.

This is a Intel i-7/920 with 6gb ram.

Any ideas why? I have used tar and gzips on solaris and winzip on win-xp but never experienced anything like this.

Any suggestions?

Thanks

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Philip Muškovac
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Desi (mohsin-j) said : 		#1

It takes almost 24 mins to zip a 60Gb file and freezes this machines all that time.

root@i7Ubuntu:/u02/VM# ls -latr
total 125973096
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2009-07-03 21:53 Raca
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2009-07-03 21:53 shared
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 2009-07-03 21:53 Racb
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 64437422080 2009-07-03 22:35 RAC-PostClusterware.tar
drwxrwxrwt 5 root root 4096 2009-07-03 22:36 .

root@i7Ubuntu:/u02/VM# date
Fri Jul 3 22:40:45 EDT 2009

root@i7Ubuntu:/u02/VM# gzip RAC-PostClusterware.tar

root@i7Ubuntu:/u02/VM# date
Fri Jul 3 23:04:53 EDT 2009

root@i7Ubuntu:/u02/VM#

After GZip it's about 2.6Gb

-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 2754975596 2009-07-03 22:35 RAC-PostClusterware.tar.gz

Revision history for this message
Best Philip Muškovac (yofel) said : 		#2

did you try running it with 'nice' (less cpu priority) and 'ionice' (less HD access priority) ?

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Desi (mohsin-j) said : 		#3

Thanks Philip Muskovac, that solved my question.

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Desi (mohsin-j) said : 		#4

Not the best option but I helped....I still can't believe that using tar can bring to a complete crawl an 8cpu machine.

May be I am not sure what option I need to use for the nice. I used the default I think -10.

Thanks though for pointing that command out.

Regards,