[ale] Really slow copy

[Tim Watts]

Hi,

I'm backing up my laptop home dir to my new file server in prep to cut-over to 
Kubuntu. It's about 17GB of data. I started it about 7.30p last night and it 
was steadily pulling files (server <- laptop via NFS mount) taking about 60+% 
of the CPU... UNTIL I left for a few hours and came back. It's now only 
copied about 2.5GB and getting only 10+/-% of CPU. I tried renicing the 
process which has had only a marginal improvement. Nothing else seems to be 
competing for CPU or disk IO. The system has 1GB RAM and the copy process is 
taking about 70% of memory. The network medium is CAT 6 via a LinkSys WRT54G. 
I was streaming some audio from the Internet for a while but shut that down 
and it's made no difference. The laptop has 1GB RAM and a number of apps 
loaded but the CPU is fairly idle.

17GB is a lot of data. Maybe I'm not fully appreciating that -- i.e. maybe it 
just takes this long to copy all that data? Although the rate is about 
2.6MB/min (ball park figure).

Any ideas how I can get this puppy moving again?

Thanks.

-- 
The worst loneliness is not to be comfortable with yourself.
 -- Mark Twain