help with 'tar|rsh tar'

[Dan Nelson]

In the last episode (Jun 24), Nikolas Britton said:
> On 6/23/06, Nikolas Britton <nikolas.britton at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Thanks!, but I got rsh going. I first had to edit /etc/hosts.equiv,
> > after that I figured it out:
> >
> > tar cf - . | rsh 192.168.1.242 'cd /data; tar xpvf -'
> >
> > I was thinking tar -f as in file.tar but it's not, you have to cd
> > into the source directory you want to copy... anyways... I'm
> > getting around 30MB/s now... it should be in the 50-60MB/s range...
> > Good enough for now though. Thanks again...
> >
> 
> hostA = P4 3GHz Prescott, Intel 82547EI GigE, FreeBSD 6.1/i386.
> hostB = Athlon64 3000, Marvell Yukon Lite GigE, FreeBSD 6.1/amd64.
> 
> Anyone know why load is so high on hostA, is it because I used tar -v?
> top shows:
>
> CPU states:  0.0% user,  1.5% nice, 26.2% system, 61.4% interrupt, 10.9%  idle

That 61% interrupt looks bad, but I don't have any ideas.

>  PID USERNAME  THR PRI NICE   SIZE    RES STATE    TIME   WCPU COMMAND
> 18698 nbritton    1 130   20  1292K   832K RUN    171:46 28.12% rsh
> 18696 nbritton    1  -4  -20  1588K  1068K getblk  48:25  6.88% bsdtar

Try raising the blocksize in tar.  The default is 10K.  This bumps it
to 64K:

 tar cbf 128 - . | ...

-- 
	Dan Nelson
	dnelson at allantgroup.com