2014-10-29 21:44 GMT+01:00 Colin Percival <[email protected]>: > On 10/29/14 11:44, Elvis Stansvik wrote: > > I just signed up for Tarsnap and I'm very pleased with the service. It's > a > > weight off my shoulders to finally have both my laptop and my small > FreeBSD > > server backed up somewhere. Many thanks to Colin for the nice design of > the > > system and the simple tar-like interface. > > :-) > > > Short question: When extracting a small (few KB) file from a somewhat big > > archive (15 GB or so, with quite a number of files), what is it that > takes > > time? For me it took ~4-5 minutes to get such a file out. > > > > It's not a problem at all since this is something I hope to never have > to do, > > but I was just curious what is the actual bottleneck. I'm guessing it's > the > > downloading, decryption and scanning of the tar header? > > You're exactly right. Tarsnap stores the tar headers separately from the > tar > data in order to speed up this process, but there's still ~50-100 bytes > (512 > bytes of tar header, compressed) which needs to be downloaded per file so > that > tarsnap can decide which parts of the archive need to be extracted. >
Alright. Makes sense. Thanks for the quick answer. Elvis > > -- > Colin Percival > Security Officer Emeritus, FreeBSD | The power to serve > Founder, Tarsnap | www.tarsnap.com | Online backups for the truly paranoid >
