On Mar 31, 2005, at 4:32 PM, Thomas Denier wrote:

We recently restored a large mail server. We restored about nine
million
files with a total size of about ninety gigabytes. These were read from
nine 3490 K tapes. The node we were restoring is the only node using
the
storage pool involved. We ran three parallel streams. The restore took
just over 24 hours.

The client is Intel Linux with 5.2.3.0 client code. The server is
mainframe
Linux with 5.2.2.0 server code. ...

I noticed that you didn't mention the file system type. The effects of
file system type and layout of the subject instance is an often
overlooked contributor to performance in operations which are
mass-populating the file system, as a restoral will. A journaled file
system can exhibit a lot of overhead as its journal is written with at
least metadata, depending upon type; and an ill-located journal can
make for a lot of disk arm diversions during the restoral, aggravating
elapsed time.

IBM's outstanding documentation store includes a great series on Linux
file systems, which one can jump into at
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/linux/library/l-fs7.html .

  Richard Sims