Which is the fastest TAR application? [closed]

Question

I've got a script that tars an entire source code directory (around 800MB), and I want it to run as fast as possible. GNU Tar, for some reason, was kind of slow when untarring. I was wondering if anyone's already made this comparison and knows which application has the fastest tar/untar implementation. For Windows, btw.

Answer 1

Comparing GNU tar with what?

The performance of your tar program will ultimately (when you've removed factors such as anti-virus) be I/O-bound, so your best hope to get a faster tar is to get faster hardware.

Answer 2

http://www.7-zip.org/ may be a bit faster, haven't tested them directly against each other. One consideration may be to just get your tar script to store the files in a tar archive instead of compressing them, but that is only if filesize is not a consideration. If you dont need them to get any smaller, just to be stored in a single tar file, then turning the compression off altogether will give you a significant benefit.

Also, just check and make sure that you dont have an on-access virus scanner running in the background, as that will rescan your tar file every time it changes and significantly add to your tarring time.

Answer 3

I tested 7zip against GNU tar, and it's slower.. :( WinRAR is also slower.