star is definitely much faster than GNU tar ,-) If you know a fater tar implementation than star, send the name, a test and a bug report!
In my testing, star didn't perform very well extracting large archives to memory-backed disk. (10% to 15% slower than either bsdtar or GNU tar.) Of course, this was a little while ago and may not be relevant now. At the time (March, 2007), I believe I was testing star 1.5a73, GNU tar 1.16.1, and bsdtar 2.0.22. I should probably try to repeat those tests with newer versions. Cheers, Tim Kientzle
