Odd thing about restore times

[Craig Hartnett <craig@1811.spamslip.com>]

Hi there,

This email was going to be a (mild) complaint about restore times, but
then I noticed an odd thing: If I restore a directory with about 30
full-size, full-resolution images, the directories in the path to the
directory I restore are all created within about 45-90 seconds, and then
the files start coming down at roughly the rate I might expect for files
of about 2 MB each. The files were all restored within about 5 minutes.
If I restore a single, small text file, it is restored in seconds.

Yet in both cases, the command does not exit for about 16-21 minutes,
which is what was going to lead me to complain. However, the actual
restore was done about as quickly as one would expect.

In all test cases I used the following command:

	tarsnap -x -f ARCHIVE media/USER/PATH/DIRECTORY
	tarsnap -x -f ARCHIVE media/USER/PATH/DIRECTORY/FILE.EXT

Is it possible I'm doing something wrong, or is this a known bug? There
is nothing mentioned at http://www.tarsnap.com/improve-speed.html that
would seem to be about this.

Thanks.


Craig