On Nov 10, 2008, at 9:43 AM, jdawg wrote:

> I have a job that runs every Saturday morning on one of our Servers.
> It job is to backup all of our vobs. The job is getting longer and  
> longer
>
> My question to you: the tar cz command, (or tar gzip combo), in your
> experience, is it more I/O bound or CPU bound, or both?
> My guess is that it is I/O bound.

I don't think you can say anything useful 'in general'.  The hardware  
you have, its configuration, the size of your files, etc.  These are  
all local issues.

You need monitoring.  On the basic end of things, dumping the output  
of iostat and other monitoring tools while your job is running will  
give some idea of how busy you are.  Something like ganglia or cacti  
isn't that hard to set up, and will give you data that's much easier  
to interpret.  (Pretty pictures!)

alex