copy and tar performance?

[Bruno Wolff III]

On Wed, Dec 27, 2006 at 12:32:51 -0700,
  Kevin Kempter <kevin at kevinkempterllc.com> wrote:
> Hi List;
> 
> Whenever I copy large files (>2G) or create large tar archives I basically 
> loose control of my box (2.1Gz Laptop running FC5) until the copy or tar is 
> complete. I can still try and work but the mouse movements are delayed 
> several seconds, other programs take minutes to respond, etc.
> 
> Is there a way I can overcome this so I can still work as normal during these 
> operations, maybe a way to limit the amount of cpu or system resources that a 
> cp or tar process can have? Other ideas?

Using 'nice' might help solve your problem.
If you are doing the copy graphically, there may be overhead with displaying
the progress (I don't do copies that way, so don't know if in fact that is
the case) which slows things down and doing a command line copy might be
easier on your CPU.

Do you have write caching disabled on your hard drive? If so you might get
better performance using write barriers for safety instead, and turning
caching back on.

Do you have you file systems mounted noatime? If you are copying lots of
small files, updating the last accessed time of those file might be noticiable.