i always use gtar to tape so am limited by tape drive speeds (luckily now 33 MB/s with SDLT II/600 !!) so personally i don't see any warrants for it.
if you did gzcat -c *.tar.gz | tar -whatever on a SMP you'ld get some speed up automatically i'ld imagine (vs. tar -z), but unless you had some really large tar balls i can't see where it would help that much.
> Now that multicore chips are everywhere, it seems like a worthwhile > feature. I did some crude measurements on a 4P box and saw the potential > for a decent speedup. [Specifically, untar of a .gz wasn't bottlenecked on > IO.] What do you like to achive here and on which OS?
