Thanks all for your feedback.

A number of you suggested that exploding the tarball is taking too long. Good. I'll have to bug the admin and see if he can't figure out the problem.

A little more info about how I performed the untar:

I ran $ tar -xvf depot_files.tar > /dev/null so I wasn't being slowed down by terminal output. There was also no copying across a network or even across a file system involved since I exploded the tar to the same directory where the tarball lived.

Do you think that the sheer number of directories could be at issue? The depot holds java projects which, given java package structure, contains many directies.

As this box is newly connected to the SAN it could just be a tuning issue.

Thanks for the help!

John-Mason