Problem description: A given process is taking very long to complete. It does not seem to be hanging, but it does not seem to go very quick either ... I'm spotting several background processes, but they all get low amount of CPU, and they are in SLEEP phase (according to TOP). No other process is using lots of CPU ... it seems like the OS does not want to push the processes ... but leaves them hanging, waiting for ... waiting for what ? Ex. System: u514603 Wed Jan 23 23:06:52 2008 Load averages: 0.05, 0.06, 0.06 260 processes: 209 sleeping, 50 running, 1 zombie Cpu states: CPU LOAD USER NICE SYS IDLE BLOCK SWAIT INTR SSYS 0 0.05 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 100.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 6 0.01 0.4% 0.0% 0.2% 99.4% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 7 0.09 0.0% 0.0% 5.1% 94.9% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% -------- avg 0.05 0.2% 0.0% 1.8% 98.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% 0.0% Memory: 1891952K (1426876K) real, 4326484K (3493912K) virtual, 24494356K free Page# 1/6 CPU TTY PID USERNAME PRI NI SIZE RES STATE TIME %WCPU %CPU COMMAND 0 ? 68 root 152 20 43128K 38336K run 63:59 3.27 3.27 vxfsd 7 pty/ttyp2 743 root 152 24 1289M 603M run 1:05 0.87 0.87 java 6 pty/ttyp2 28440 orafinm 138 24 10412K 1980K sleep 0:01 0.58 0.58 unzip 6 pty/ttyp2 28550 orafinm 138 24 10348K 1916K sleep 0:01 0.57 0.57 unzip 7 pty/ttyp2 28724 orafinm 187 24 10348K 1916K run 0:00 0.65 0.56 unzip 7 pty/ttyp2 28722 orafinm 138 24 10348K 1916K sleep 0:00 0.63 0.55 unzip 6 pty/ttyp2 28647 orafinm 138 24 10348K 1916K sleep 0:00 0.52 0.52 unzip 0 pty/ttyp2 12696 orafinm 152 24 753M 252M run 0:46 0.44 0.44 java 7 ? 54 root 152 20 1296K 1152K run 4:22 0.41 0.40 schedcpu (..) Look at the UNZIP commands ... I'm waiting on those ... I'm using GLANCE as well, don't know how to interprete this one ...

If your zip files are on the same physical device, unzip the zip files one after another. If you run a couple of unzip commands (on the same physical drive) at the same time, all these unzip processes will compete with each other for the physical drive. The physical drive will spend most of the time doing the mechanical movements, not the electronic data read/write. If you unzip the files to a different physical drive than the zip file itself, it will run faster too. Luke Chi