[Wylug-help] ReiserFS slow copy

[Jim Jackson]

On Thu, 14 Aug 2003, Mike Williams wrote:

> On Thursday 14 August 2003 12:09, Dan Walker wrote:
> > I've got a reiserFS server drive which I was copying (using 'cp -ax', I'm
> > afraid) to another Reiser drive, and while it was copying a directory with
> > several thousand directories containing many small files each the amount of
> > data it was copying was abysmally slow - like, about 1 meg a minute.  I
> > understand reiserfs is excellent for lots of small files so I'm at a loss
> > to explain it to the boss who now wants an NT server after seeing this 10
> > hour copy operation. It was hitting 1 Gig a minute in other areas of the
> > drive.
>
> Can't say I know why it took so long, but the same operation would take a
> similar amount of time on windows. (Ex) users of windows must have
> experienced the copy progress get almost to the end and suddenly jump to
> several million minutes left.
>
> If you need to do this sort of thing again I'd use tar. You can, I hear, do
> clever stuff with pipes and do the whole transport in one line. I'm not sure
> how you'd get around the problem of different paths off hand tho.

I'd echo trying tar. It could be a problem with cp.

something like....

 (cd fromdir ; tar clf - . ) | (cd todir ; tar xfv - -p )

would be the one liner. I regularly use something similar for copying
data from one partition to another. The 'l' option stops tar from straying
outside the filesystem - one may need to remove depending on what the
situation is.

Jim