JillSwift Posted December 5, 2009 Report Share Posted December 5, 2009 I have a 4 core processor, and I wanted to take advantage of the unused 3 cores to speed up my cron managed morning backups-to-external-HD. So, I looked around and found pbzip2 - a version of bzip2 that does parallel processing. To make tar use it, I: mv /usr/bin/bzip2 /usr/bin/bzip2.old ln -s /usr/bin/pbzip2 /usr/bin/bzip2 I've already had a good test run this morning (going from just under an hour to just under 15 minutes, yay! :happy: ). However, true to my paranoid self, I'm now concerned this will negatively impact some other aspect of my system... though I can't think of anything. Can anyone else? Or, is there a "best practice" for doing this other than making a link? [moved from Software by spinynorman] Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Greg2 Posted December 5, 2009 Report Share Posted December 5, 2009 It may cause some problems if you do any dev or rpm work on that system... however I'm not positive. :) I would suggest removing the symlink and try something like this [greg@halfway temp]$ l usr/ [greg@halfway temp]$ tar cf usr.tar.bz2 --use-compress-prog=pbzip2 usr/ [greg@halfway temp]$ l usr/ usr.tar.bz2 That was simply a small test with my single core cpu, and it worked ok. You would have to check it with your cpu. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JillSwift Posted December 5, 2009 Author Report Share Posted December 5, 2009 Bummer: I tried that and tar segfaults every time. I've no clue why that would be, given that there's little difference between the link and instructing tar to use a different compressor. I keep experimenting. (BTW, I don't yet know how to make RPMs, so I've not tried that.) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
scarecrow Posted December 7, 2009 Report Share Posted December 7, 2009 AFAIK the only way is recompiling that app with cflags suited for your CPU/hardware. Mandriva binaries are "just" i586 optimized. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
JillSwift Posted December 7, 2009 Author Report Share Posted December 7, 2009 The first ting I tried was recompiling bzip2 - there is no support built into the code for parallel processing, thus pbzip2. :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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