@mercenary_sysadmin It looks like its a recordsize issue, which in hindsight makes total sense.
So where its slowing down is when PM is gathering sort data. Part of the sort data might be in those tiny xmp files. I tested out 16,32 and 64k recordsizes and all of them were under a minute. I’ll add 128,256 and 512 later and do multiple tests to get an average, but it looks like changing the recordsize is the fix.
So should I change recordsize away from 1M on my archive datasets as well? I won’t access most of them often.