Comment by fhdkweig
I was told a story by some hackers in the old multi-user mainframe days. They said that a good speed booster was to have the program open a terminal because it made the mainframe OS think it was a real-time user interactive program and give it more resources.
I still have the brainwash/muscle-memory to type:
$ gunzip -c somefile.tar.gz | tar xvf -
.. because there was, once, a day when the terminal buffer available for this pipe was bigger than available memory offered to a process by default, meaning the thing would unpack faster if I did that versus:
$ tar zxvf somefile.tar.gz
Admittedly, this discrepancy of available memory was usually because the BOFH hadn't realized there was also an allocation for pipes-per-user, so it was a neat trick to get around the hard limits that BOFH had imposed on some of my processes in terms of heap allocation ..