Dreadful tar with remote device

[Jon Schneider]

I have a new 4.1 installation but found my backup was stonkingly slow.
It (as it used to when the machine ran linux) pumps data to a tape
drive on another machine. After a few experiments I found that the
problem lies not with rsh but with tar itself.
I think the following speaks for itself. The machine is a P233MMX.

Script started on Thu Aug 10 21:51:27 2000
bash-2.04# ls -l meg
-rw-r--r--  1 root  wheel  1048576 Aug 10 21:50 meg
bash-2.04# time rcp meg localhost:/tmp

real	0m0.374s
user	0m0.006s
sys	0m0.063s
bash-2.04# time tar cvf localhost:/tmp/fff.tar meg 
meg

real	0m10.511s
user	0m0.001s
sys	0m0.054s
bash-2.04# exit

Script done on Thu Aug 10 21:52:17 2000

The corresponding tar tv is just as slooow.

What's going on ?

	Jon