BogeyMan Posted December 14, 2012 Report Share Posted December 14, 2012 Even when I turn off the Retrospect engine from the prefpane, I am seeing RetroISA with over 150% CPU utilization. See attached screen shot. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lennart_T Posted December 14, 2012 Report Share Posted December 14, 2012 That is a known problem and Retrospect is working on it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kerryd Posted December 14, 2012 Report Share Posted December 14, 2012 I noticed that too but it seems to settle down. its at its worst after a restart, settles down and then takes off again. What I don't like is the amount of real memory it is using in Activity Monitor. I'm thinking of removing Retrospect 10 from my machine and going with a different backup strategy for my iMac and MacBook Air. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
David W Lee Posted December 15, 2012 Report Share Posted December 15, 2012 We are testing significant performance improvements for Instant Scan on our primary computers, including mine. Please contact Support so that we can better understand your experience and work with you when a pre-release is ready. In the interim, Instant Scan (RetroISA) can be: - disabled for current MacOS boot session from Terminal: sudo launchctl unload /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.retrospect.retroisa.plist - disabled from future MacOS boot session from Terminal: sudo mv /Library/LaunchDaemons/com.retrospect.retroisa.plist ~ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jl1897 Posted January 6, 2013 Report Share Posted January 6, 2013 Mr. Lee, Thank you for the commands in your post. If we have run the command to disable Instant Scan (RetroISA) from running at boot, what is the command to reenable RetroISA for future MacOS boot sessions? Thanks! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kiddailey Posted January 13, 2013 Report Share Posted January 13, 2013 FYI: Also see this thread: http://forums.retros...expensive-docs/ This post by SmokeAndMirrors may be particularly helpful. After recently upgrading to version 10, I noticed the RetroISA background app keeping my server stuck at a painful crawl, using hundreds of MB of RAM and 30-90% CPU constantly. I've got 7 machines that it backs up totaling about 1.5TB of data. Before I turned the scanning off, it was using up over 500MB of Real Memory and edging close to 1GB of virtual after just a half-hour or so of running. I'm really hoping there is going to be an option to simply turn the instant scanning off. I *much* preferred the old scanning process over the background app. It may have been slow, but as my backups run during lower usage periods, it wasn't an issue. The most important point though is that I had control of when the scanning occurred. Edit: Mac OS X 10.6.8 2x3Ghz Dual-Core Intel Xeon 2GB RAM Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jlbrown Posted February 21, 2013 Report Share Posted February 21, 2013 Some problem here. OS is OS X 10.8.2. Client is 10.0.0 (174). Any news on a fix? Happy to try a beta Retro Client if that would help. James. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mayoff Posted February 21, 2013 Report Share Posted February 21, 2013 Have you tried the pre-release version yet? http://kb.retrospect.com/articles/en_US/Retrospect_Article/grx-assert/ 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
prl Posted March 1, 2013 Report Share Posted March 1, 2013 Have you tried the pre-release version yet? http://kb.retrospect...cle/grx-assert/ Has anyone tried the pre-release of 10.1? If so, how is it? Still waiting to buy Retro 10 until the ISA bugs are addressed... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Monafly Posted March 1, 2013 Report Share Posted March 1, 2013 The pre-release version (10.1.0 (187)) has been stable for me for weeks now. It did seem to fix a number of issues I was having with loosing track of media sets. I will see if it fixed grooming issues shortly-still a bit reluctant on this because of the massive trouble I had with earlier versions. I see RetroISA using quite a bit of processor time on the engine machine now and again when I check, but it doesn't seem to be excessive nor cause any problems. No clients are complaining either. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
prl Posted March 1, 2013 Report Share Posted March 1, 2013 Thanks Monafly. I may give the free trial period a spin and upgrade immediately to the 10.1 pre-release. Anyone know if there are problems with compatibility of optical media sets going back from v10 to v9? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wp1 Posted March 3, 2013 Report Share Posted March 3, 2013 Have you tried the pre-release version yet? http://kb.retrospect...cle/grx-assert/ RetroISA is slightly better than before, but only slightly. On my Mac Pro, after 24 hours it spends about 2/3 of the time eating 30-60% of a CPU and 1/3 idled to a bit less than 1%. On my mini, which only has two cores, it is far worse - close to 95% of the time RetroISA is eating 30-70% of a CPU. The short time it is idled, it is still eating 5-10%, sometimes. I can provide "top" samples, but didn't want to paste 1000 lines here. I'll be disabling RetroISA again. How is it possible to eat so much CPU just processing file system events? Time Machine certainly doesn't have this issue. Also not fixed is communication with Windows 6.5.136 clients. It communicates with the client, but doesn't show any disks. This worked with Retrospect 9, but was broken at 10.0 and is still broken with 10.1. 10.0 release notes show this client version as supported. I did call this in to support, but no answers beyond a should shrug. If you disabled RetroISA with "launchctl unload -w ....", you have to re-enable it with "launchctl load -w ..." or the client installer will abort with no intelligible error (install log shows postinstall failed). I disabled it this way because changing the .ini file as documented didn't work. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Monafly Posted March 4, 2013 Report Share Posted March 4, 2013 wp1: Regarding the windows client communication, what is the Windows OS involved? In spite of earlier erroneous advertising, RS 10 no longer talks to Windows OS's earlier than XP. I had the same issue with some legacy Win 2000 machines. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wp1 Posted March 5, 2013 Report Share Posted March 5, 2013 I tried Retroclient 6.5.136 on both Windows 2000 (I think WIn2000 isn't supported by v10 Retrospect), and Windows 2003. I also tried Retroclient 7.7.114 on Windows 2003, with the same result. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BDMSTUDIOS Posted March 5, 2013 Report Share Posted March 5, 2013 I did install RS10.1.0 (187) today and yes, the RetroISA CPU load has dropped from 110% to 75%! Now it's real easy to start/stop the RetroISA engine from within System Preferences! Still have to search & rescue a lot of features within RS, but I hope untill 13th of April I'll have enough time to do so! Keep you updated! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BDMSTUDIOS Posted March 5, 2013 Report Share Posted March 5, 2013 Have you tried the pre-release version yet? http://kb.retrospect...cle/grx-assert/ Thanks for the link! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
wp1 Posted March 7, 2013 Report Share Posted March 7, 2013 That stop/start button has been there for a long time. That's not RetroISA, but the main Retrospect engine. I can't tell if you're being sarcastic, or actually happy about the decrease in CPU usage. A decrease from 110% to 75% is certainly a significant improvement, but it isn't anything to shout about considering the RetroISA daemon runs all the time. A decrease to well under 1% (all the time) would be more what I would expect from a background daemon monitoring fsevents. Do you see Apple using that much to track changes for Time Machine? 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BDMSTUDIOS Posted March 7, 2013 Report Share Posted March 7, 2013 Thanks for your prompt reply! That stop/start button has been there for a long time. That's not RetroISA, but the main Retrospect engine. You're 100% right about that is was there, but for me it was not always working properly, my mistake! I can't tell if you're being sarcastic, or actually happy about the decrease in CPU usage. A decrease from 110% to 75% is certainly a significant improvement, but it isn't anything to shout about considering the RetroISA daemon runs all the time. Never sarcastic, but always optimistic/realistic whilst confronting problems/issues in my life!! When RS 10.1.0.178 isn't able to connect to the networked mediaset on my Synology DS1812+, why does it start boiling the CPU (I did not buy a multi-core MAC for this) with percentages running high as to 500%? That's the question! A decrease to well under 1% (all the time) would be more what I would expect from a background daemon monitoring fsevents. Do you see Apple using that much to track changes for Time Machine? For me it's not a battle between two brands, it's just simply living up to the expectations based on the claims advertised! NUFF SAID! Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
prl Posted March 17, 2013 Report Share Posted March 17, 2013 I've just installed Retro 10.1.0 (187) on a trial licence. I got it to install after a couple of attempts (I'm not sure what was going on), and yesterday I did a Recycle Media backup on my system, because I wasn't sure about how ISA would "catch up" with files modified between the previous backup and the installation of ISA. On a couple of occasions when I installed, including the most recent, successful, attempt, Retrospect didn't "unpack" the documentation and other goodies out of Retrospect.app into the enclosing folder as it should normally do. The first backup was done yesterday without any problems, and without ISA over-consuming resources, but since I started my MacBook Pro this morning, the RetroISA process on the laptop (configured as the Retrospect server) has been consuming 195% CPU time (on a dual core Intel Core 2 Duo). Because I do backups to optical media, I normally only run the Retro engine when I am doing a backup, so it doesn't start automatically at startup, and I close it down when I've finished doing the backups, so that other applications can use the DVD reader. Running OS X 10.8.3. Still glad that I haven't paid any money for Retro 10. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
David W Lee Posted March 22, 2013 Report Share Posted March 22, 2013 Compared to 10.1.0 (187), the official 10.1.0 (221) release has further efficiency improvements in Instant Scan. We are monitoring customer feedback, and have further improvements and features planned. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
David W Lee Posted March 23, 2013 Report Share Posted March 23, 2013 http://retrospect.com/en/documentation/user_guide/mac10/instant_scan now addresses most frequently asked questions. PDF and ePUB versions will be updated in the next few days. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
prl Posted March 23, 2013 Report Share Posted March 23, 2013 Thanks, David. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bleary Posted April 2, 2013 Report Share Posted April 2, 2013 I gave up and turned off the instant scan. But the Retrospect engine itself is using up 150-200% of the processor. Keep coming in to find our server hopelessly hung. discouraged. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
jlbrown Posted May 27, 2013 Report Share Posted May 27, 2013 RetroISA climbs up to over 3.16GB of memory for me. Mac OS 10.8.3 Retro version 10.1.0 (221) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bdunagan Posted June 3, 2013 Report Share Posted June 3, 2013 @JamesBrown: Please contact our support team about your experience with Instant Scan. It should not be taking up that amount of RAM. @bleary: Sorry for such a long delay. If you're still having issues with the Retrospect engine's CPU usage, please contact our support team, and it would be fantastic if you could include an Activity Monitor sample of the RetroEngine process when it's in that state. Support: http://retrospect.com/support/contact Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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