bsdtar vs gtar performance

[Tim Kientzle]

Kris and Ruslan were recently discussing the performance of bsdtar
relative to gtar, which prompted me to do some measurements
of my own.   I used /usr/ports as my test, because it stresses
file and directory creation over extracting large files.

Here are some initial results, based on ten runs of each test on a
quiescent system, comparing results with PHK's "ministat":

 * Creating uncompressed archives:  bsdtar and gtar showed
    no difference in total time.

 * Extracting gzip-compressed archives:  bsdtar and gtar showed
    no difference in total time.

 * Extracting uncompressed archives:  gtar is about 13% faster
    than bsdtar in my test.  Interestingly (to me), this was the same
    with or without -m.  (I've long suspected dir timestamp restores
    as a contributor; this shows otherwise.)

Tim Kientzle