Most of this I agree on, exept where to split the poccess boundy, I would make the whole task seperate forked out up to 4 at a time in parrallel. His CPU throttleing is happening at the time of compress and decompress. As far as storing the uncompressed files in ram, I think that the ram is more useful in this case for the zlib/gzip operation which tends to slow down a lot when starved. Of course who knows about the disk IO =) he could have a just array of JBOD striped on multiple interfaces =)...

-Waswas