TAR is consuming to much memory

Hi folks,
I'm writing a backup script which creates incremental TAR archives, encrypt them with gpg and uploads the encrypted archives to rapidshare. This should create a desaster recovery backup.

The script works fine while the archive size is small. As soon as the backup volume goes up (e.g. 700mb of jpegs) the tar process need nearly infinite time and the box goes down. Checking memory consumption in a second shell I see that nearly every free memory is eaten up by tar.

Is this a known problem? With solution?

The tar command I used:

tar -cz -f $TGZFILE -g $SNARFILE $DIRECTORIES

No differences if I discard the compress switch 'z'.

Callidus

you can use nice +20 to assign just a bit of cpu time per cycle to that task, memory should be less used too..