Weird problem with tar

["Gustav Almström" <ranma algonet se>]

I did a clean RedHat 5.0-install yesterday and everything works 
excellent except one thing. When I untar large files, like the 
kernel-source, it takes forever. Tar extracts 15-20 files, then just
pauses for 5-10 seconds, extracts 15-20 files, pauses etc.

Unpacking the kernel-source took about 10 minutes on my K6-200 with
64 megs of RAM. With 4.2 it took less than one minute :(