I'm trying to tar up a directory that has about 3M tiny files in it. Tar is chugging along, but I'm thinking its going to take longer than I can wait.

I'm wondering if telling tar to not store metadata (owner, group, perms) would reduce the churn on reading and re-reading this huge directory and maybe speed things up, and if there is a tar switch that does this.

My initial perusal of the man page only gets me something like --no-xattrs, which looks like a start, but I was hoping someone had some specific knowledge.