MT-write r100528

MT-write enables tar to write multiple files in parallel. The goal thereof is to speed up the proces of extracting a tar file to a filesystem.<br /><br />Especially Solaris' ZFS filesystem should be able to benefit from MT-write's strategy, although I had no time to verify yet. But on a 4 processor Sun machine I was able to measure a speedup of over 60 percent with a 1GB tar file on a tmpfs.<br /><br />How does MT-write work?<br /><br />MT-write intercepts the executable's calls to write and friends and hands them off to worker threads. In consequence the executable will be unaware of occuring errors. If any error occures mtwrite.so writes an errormessage to the standard error output of the executable.<br /><br />How big is the benefit<br /><br />Well that really depends. On Solaris' tmpfs on a 4 processor machine, I observed a speedup of over 60 percent. In contrast, ufs performance on the same machine didn't make any difference.<br /><br />How do I use it?<br /><br />mtwrite.so is a preloadable shared object designed to be preloaded to the tar executable. E.g. $ env LD_PRELOAD=mtwrite.so tar xf mytarfile.tar

Requirements:	No special requirements
Platforms:	*nix, Linux
Keyword:	Benefitwell,  Depends,  Error,  Errormessage,  Errors,  Executable,  Executablehow,  Machine,  Mt,  Mtwrite,  Mtwriteso,  Object,  Occures,  Output,  Percent,  Processor,  R100528,  Solaris,  Speedup,  Standard,  Write,  Writes
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