resource problems

[Joe Stuart]

I'm having strange problems with my freebsd server. One of them is
whenver I try to run a backup with tar and/or gzip it runs really slow .
Running tar and gzip together only compressess about 200K a minute. I
also get the same problems running scp.  While copying files between
servers I get maybe 10K a second, but if I copy data between linux
servers I average 5MB/s.  I didnt wholly set this server up myself and
am wondering if there was some kind of resource limits(cpu limit or
maybe memory) set on the server.  I checked /etc/login.conf and
everything there seems to be set fine.  I dont know freebsd very well
and am wondering if anyone has any suggestions for me.

Thanks.