by Occasionally I archive large directories to tape, using tar, during the day.
The main problem this poses is that tar apparently hogs quite a bit of
memory. If I leave it for a minute or so all of my windows get swapped out
and interactive response goes to the dogs.
I have tried running the tar process at a higher nice value, but of course
this doesn't help, because it's not a cpu usage issue but a memory problem.
What I would like to do is limit the tar process to a small amount of
physical memory. It is ok if tar performance suffers as long as my
interactive response is preserved.
Any hints?
thanks in advance,
--
- Spencer Greene +1 408 727 5445 -
- Santa Clara, California USA {mips,ub-gate,bdcsys}!c2tech!sgreene -
- "But we can't do that - think of what a Pandora's bag of worms we'd open!" -