Why cannot dar use the full power of my multi-processor computer?
Parallel computing programming is a science by itself. For having done a specialization in that area during my studies, I can explain briefly here the constraints. A program can use several processor if the algorithm it uses is able to be parallelized. Such an algorithm can either statically (at programming time) or dynamically (at execution time) be cut in several independent execution threads. Theses different execution threads must be as much autonomous as possible between them, if you don’t want to have one thread waiting for another (which is not what we want). The constraint is this: if you cannot have different threads with no or very little communication and dependence then parallelization does not worth it. Back to dar. From a very abstracted point of view, dar works by fetching files from the filesystem and by appending their data in a single file (the archive). For each file, dar records in memory the location of the data and once all files have been treated, this location i
