[PLUG] a bit more information

[website reader]

{ And you were copying to and from locations on the same drive?  Or was
there another drive involved? }

I was copying from the same drive to the same drive in the same
partition.  This was a SATA drive.

What filesystem(s) are mounted at these (source and destination)
locations?  (ext3? ext4? other?)

The filesystems were ext3.

Someone else mentioned possible I/O problem.

What is a bit irritating in all this is that cp should NOT have
grabbed so much main memory and allocated it to disk cache.  It took
99.65% of the memory.  I would have expected it to throttle back and
only use 95% of the available memory, insteading of grabbing
everything but 86 megabytes, which was almost minimal for this smp
system. (16 processors)