I'm trying to tar up a directory that has about 3M tiny files in it. Tar is chugging along, but I'm thinking its going to take longer than I can wait.
I'm wondering if telling tar to not store metadata (owner, group, perms) would reduce the churn on reading and re-reading this huge directory and maybe speed things up, and if there is a tar switch that does this.
My initial perusal of the man page only gets me something like –no-xattrs, which looks like a start, but I was hoping someone had some specific knowledge.
Best Answer
I've got to think that the performance of the underlying filesystem probably has a lot to do with what you're getting out of tar.
What is the filesystem you're reading from, and how tiny are the files?