On ubuntu server here and I'm trying to unpack 300M image files from a compressed file format using Java.

My unpack rate is 0.5Mbytes/sec, abysmal (34 days to unpack 1.5TB at this rate).

I'm trying to figure out why, and the only oddity I notice is that updatedb.mlocate is always working when I'm doing the unpack process. I want to turn it off to see if it's getting in the way, but I don't understand much about what it is.

top

top - 05:16:52 up 1 day,  5:15,  3 users,  load average: 2.00, 2.01, 1.83

Tasks:  83 total,   1 running,  82 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie

Cpu(s):  0.4%us,  0.8%sy,  0.0%ni,  8.4%id, 90.2%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,  0.2%st

Mem:   1737420k total,  1722680k used,    14740k free,  1241260k buffers

Swap:   917500k total,      160k used,   917340k free,   165448k cached



  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND

22901 davidpar  20   0 1051m  56m 4992 S    3  3.3   0:47.84 java

 2221 root      20   0 32348  26m  268 D    1  1.6  27:57.86 updatedb.mlocat

   25 root      20   0     0    0    0 S    0  0.0  10:10.77 kswapd0

  678 root      20   0 15864  444  268 S    0  0.0   0:19.45 irqbalance

  849 davidpar  20   0 26560 1676  332 S    0  0.1  17:17.49 screen

iotop

Total DISK READ: 4.07 M/s | Total DISK WRITE: 789.62 K/s

  TID  PRIO  USER     DISK READ  DISK WRITE  SWAPIN     IO>    COMMAND

 2221 idle root     1556.98 K/s    6.36 K/s  0.00 % 99.61 % updatedb.mlocate

22902 be/4 davidpar    2.54 M/s  671.93 K/s  0.00 % 96.96 % java -cp /home/davidparks21/fruggutils/lib/FruggMapreduceJobs.~educe.UnpackImages /mnt/local/imagebinaries-r-00010 /mnt/ebs1/

  547 be/3 root        0.00 B/s   87.47 K/s  0.00 %  0.30 % [jbd2/xvdf-8]

  177 be/3 root        0.00 B/s    3.98 K/s  0.00 %  0.15 % [jbd2/xvda1-8]