On 2020-10-07 14:17, Cameron Simpson wrote:
On 06Oct2020 16:32, ToddAndMargo <ToddAndMargo@zoho.com> wrote:
I am noticing that

   tar czvf xxxxx

is only using one of my cores (and pretty much all of
the core).

Is there a way to get it to use more than one core?
It is writing data serailly. In what way do you think using another core
would help?

Last time I looks the "z" part was done by forking a gzip command for
the compression. So tar would be doing little (copying data to the
gzip) and the gzip would be CPU bound if it can get data fast enough and
write out fast enough.

Cheers,
Cameron Simpson <cs@cskk.id.au>

Hi Cameron,

I have no idea how tar works.  I was just looking for a little
extra performance.

And dump (dump/restore), which goes like the winds, is basically
doing the same thing as tar and utilizes all four of my cores. 
Here is a core usage screenshot of a compressed dump running
on my machine:



The blue vertical lines show you the CPU usage.

-T