tar.c & blocksize

Larry McVoy lm at geowhiz.UUCP
Fri Jul 5 14:28:01 AEST 1985


*** REPLACE THIS LINE WITH YOUR MIND ***

I was playing around with tape drives and discovered that a larger blocksize
meant faster throughput, so I upped the NBLOCK define in tar.c to 127 
(the most blocks our cipher can handle).  The results were pretty good,
I went from 38 minutes to 18 minutes when dumping about 35 meg.  My 
question is this:  is it asking for trouble to play with the NBLOCK 
definition in tar.c?  Some people here have raised the question of 
compatability, ie. what about other sites, what if they don't have source
and/or can't get a hacked version of tar?  On the other hand, it seems that
the savings in time are great enough to warrent a change.

If you have an opinion on this, I'd like to here it.

-Larry McVoy		[ARPA]	mcvoy at wisc-rsch.arpa
			[UUCP]  ...!uwvax!geowhiz!lm



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