Perfomance problem backupscript (more details and tests)

Thanks for the comments on my performance problem. I followed some suggestions and 
my conclusion is that star is not performing as it one may expect. I hope someone has 
some suggestions

The reasons:
1. As Thomas suggested I timed the performance of find and compared it to star. This 
shows clearly that star need much more time than find. The results are at the end of this 
mail. The timing on a real production server is even more dramatic:
    time find ... directories ... -ctime 1>/dev/null
    real 7m41.602s, user 0m0.984s, sys 0m28.531s

    time star -c -acl -H=exustar ... directories ..>/dev/null
    ---->>>>> interrupted, takes too long to wait for <<<<----
    real 56m52s, user 9m16s, sys 9m50s  
2. Joerg Schilling suggested that the debian version was old. So I tested with 
star debian versions 1.5a57 (sarge distribution) and 1.5a60 (test distribution) and with 
version 1.5.a65 compiled on the machine. All the same result

3. I tested with XFS and Ext2 filesystems. Same result.

4. I tested on different machines (Xeon and AMD). All systems showed more or less the 
same results.

5. I tested with kernel 2.6.8-2 (debian kernel) and with 2.6.12-3 (own version). Makes no 
difference with any of the tested star versions.

6. I've not tested the tapestreamer(s), but for now I don't see any reason for doing that.

Below the timing results on a testserver.
======================================
These tests were done on: 
/dev/hde5     ext2    963M  586M  327M  65% /tmp

Kernel: 
Linux wyatt 2.6.8-2-386 #1 Thu May 19 17:40:50 JST 2005 i686 GNU/Linux

wyatt:/# time find /tmp -ctime 1 >/dev/null
real    0m1.008s
user    0m0.012s
sys     0m0.083s

Star version 1.5a60 (debian testing version)
------------------------------------------------------
wyatt:/# time star -c -acl -H=exustar /tmp>/dev/null
star: 60272 blocks + 0 bytes (total of 617185280 bytes = 602720.00k).
real    0m30.459s
user    0m0.317s
sys     0m4.836s

time star -c -H=exustar /tmp>/dev/null
real    0m29.743s
user    0m0.290s
sys     0m4.718s

time star -c -no-fifo  /tmp>/dev/null
real    0m30.325s
user    0m0.261s
sys     0m4.396s

gun tar test
----------------------------------------------------------
wyatt:/# time tar -c  /tmp>/dev/null
real    0m1.054s
user    0m0.212s
sys     0m0.110s

Star version 1.5a65 (compiled on this machine)
------------------------------------------------------
time /opt/schily/bin/star -c -no-fifo  /tmp>/dev/null
real    0m28.411s
user    0m0.293s
sys     0m4.148s

wyatt:/# time /opt/schily/bin/star -c -fifo  /tmp>/dev/null
real    0m29.654s
user    0m0.235s
sys     0m4.776s

====================================================

Met vriendelijke groet/Regards,
Ruud Baart

Prompt, Kerkstraat 173
5261 CW Vught, Netherlands
Tel: +31 73 6567041
http://www.prompt.nl