...Right now, I'm doing this all sequentially, one step after another and man is it SLOW...

If it's slow because the disks can't go faster (indicated by using less than near 100% of the CPU), then parallelizing may not be a good idea. This will cause the heads on the disk to have to do still more (very slow) seeks than they already have to do.

The only way to speed up things in this case, is to cause fewer head movements. If the proprietary program can read from STDIN, or write to STDOUT, then a (de-)compressing pipe seems like a good idea. If you have more than one physical disk, try storing the uncompressed file on a disk different from where the compressed file is located.

If possible, add more RAM to the machine (if you can't add a new disk). Having disk blocks in memory reads much faster than having to re-read from disk (just after having been extracted).

If it's slow because of the CPU being used 100%, then you have a problem that cannot be solved apart from throwing more CPU at it.

Liz

Update
Fixed typo. Indeed, we don't want paralyzed disks ;-)

In reply to Re: Best Practices for Uncompressing/Recompressing Files? by liz
in thread Best Practices for Uncompressing/Recompressing Files? by biosysadmin

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