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eDeviser
Asked: 2016-10-27 03:08:45 +0800 CST

How to force "archive manager" (file-roller) to use all cpu cores?

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I am using Ubuntu's Archive Manager (file-roller) to compress (tar.gz) some large files and directories.

Often this takes a long time, because this program uses just one of my eight CPU cores.

Is there a way to force Archive Manager to use all my CPU cores?

tar

2 Answers

  1. I've been trying to find an answer to this question myself, and I can report a partial success: p7zip, while not maxing out all cores, seems to make quite a bit of use of more than one, at least while compressing. On my dual-core system, it just about maxes out both cores, and on a family member's quad-core, it maxes out one core and runs the other three at about half load, varying between 30% and 80% or so. Extraction seems not to be multi-threaded at all, though, as it maxes out one core and the rest idle along.

    I've tried installing various of the multi-core capable compressors and creating links to them from /usr/bin, but file roller ignored them. All I could find in my research is a hint on some german forum (if the goog's translation is accurate) that there are apparently hard-coded paths in the file-roller source, so it was suggested to replace the original binaries in /bin with links to the (theoretically command-line-compatible) multi-core replacements like pigz, but I haven't felt daring enough to try that yet myself.

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  2. The forum thread from 2012, which was mentioned by MoTLD tells the fallowing solution:

    Create some softlinks in /usr/override to use pigz and lbzip2 instead of the normal common binarys. This could look like this:

    ls -l /usr/override
total 0
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 17 Oct 23 21:20 bunzip2 -> /usr/bin/lbunzip2
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 15 Oct 23 21:20 bzcat -> /usr/bin/lbzcat
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 15 Oct 23 21:19 bzip2 -> /usr/bin/lbzip2
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 15 Oct 23 21:19 gunzip -> /usr/bin/unpigz
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 13 Oct 23 21:19 gzip -> /usr/bin/pigz

    Thus programs like tar -cz are using multiple cores. Nevertheless file-roller seems not to use these symbolic links, but you can use xarchiver, which then uses multiple cores, too.

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