On Thu, 5 Sep 2002 at 3:29pm, greg wrote

> Run Time (hrs:min)        11:48
> Dump Time (hrs:min)       11:42      11:42       0:01
> Output Size (meg)       24171.4    24171.4        0.0
> Original Size (meg)     54320.4    54318.3        2.1
> Avg Compressed Size (%)    44.5       44.5        1.5   (level:#disks ...)
> Filesystems Dumped            3          2          1   (1:1)
> Avg Dump Rate (k/s)       587.4      588.0        0.8
> 
> Tape Time (hrs:min)       11:41      11:41       0:00
> Avg Tp Write Rate (k/s)   588.5      588.5       29.3

Notice how Tape Rate ~= Dump Rate?  You're not using a holding disk (or 
not one that's big enough), and so all your dumps are going straight to 
tape).  This means:

a) You can only do one at a time, i.e. all dumps happen serially.

b) You're limited by speed of the client hardware/gzip/network.

A holding disk would help things quite a bit.  Other than that, hardware 
compression might help a bit, but probably not too drastically.

-- 
Joshua Baker-LePain
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Duke University