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nice wouldn't help in this case. nice doesn't help with disk intensive processes - only with cpu-bound processes. what *would* help however, is for them to only run one tar at a time instead of 7. 7 makes the disk have to work awfully hard seeking all over the place.
i'm betting that you're on an IDE-based server. that'd explain the extremely high system CPU.
it might be time to find a host that uses SCSI exclusively. even on a shared server, you should see far fewer slowdowns from stuff like that.
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