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user interface incredibly slow.


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  • 2 weeks later...

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as i said, moving to tiger and the newest version of retro6 does cure this issue. i guess if you are desperate to get this solved then the (relatively) simple fix is to upgrade to tiger. okay, it's not ideal but at least you will be able to backup.

 


 

It would be nice if this were addressed though. For some folks, doing an upgrade like that is not so easy.

 

For example, we are using Retrospect to backup to a local FTP server, and a Win Retrospect box is also connecting via SMB to this same 5 TB volume for its backup (don't ask... long story... lack of features and feature parity in Retrospect). It took us weeks of research to get the SMB share and everything working, so we need to be REALLY careful when switching versions of the OS, as it usually includes SMB changes. (Plus effects the FTP and everything else... so not just a matter of putting a upgrade disk in.)

 

We'll get there, but we've got a lot of testing to do first... in the mean time, we're stuck with a VERY slow interface... even on a Dual 1 GHz G4 xServe with 2 GB RAM. We need the drives to be mirrored for obvious reasons.

 

I also spent quite a bit of time trying to figure out what was wrong, until I ran across this thread.

 

-Steve

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For what it's worth, my client runs Retrospect on a backup server with the following configuration: Mac OS X 10.3.8, G4 450 MHz, 448 MB RAM, ATTO ExpressPCI UL3D PCI SCSI card that connects an internal SEAGATE ST39103LW system disk and an external Promise UltraTrak SX8000 disk array (8 fast ATA drives, each with independent controller channel, in a striped and mirrored RAID 01 config). The remote "client" system that is backed up is the main file server, a G4 dual 533 MHz system with a similar SCSI storage subsystem the runs Mac OS Server 10.3.8 or 10.3.9.

 

The Retrospect interface is staggeringly slow upon application launch for several minutes. It then becomes almost usable until a backup script begins to run; then, forget it. These two systems may not be current hardware, but they run any and every other application just fine, including heavy file sharing at times. I consider Retrospect a pig of an application, and plan to encourage the client to ditch it as soon as possible without a significant improvement in the GUI and general performance.

 

Cheers,

 

-Nathan

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I fixed my slowness by replacing the old G4 tower with an Xserve, and replacing the original 1.0 GB RAM to 3.0 GB RAM. Your mileage may vary.

 

 

 

I think the GUI lag is due to many things...

 

 

 

Hardware (Get the fastest CPU and the most RAM you can afford)

 

Legacy Carbon code (We need native Cocoa version, Dantz!) Run the TOP command and watch Retrspect and its children hog the CPU until %100 is used! Yikes! Its Carbon. I know it is. Bad Carbon. Bad!

 

How much data you backup/ restore (I backup over 1 TB of data during a full backup- millions of filles)

 

How many nested folders you have data in (I have VERY large directory trees)

 

 

 

Notes:

 

 

 

Retrospect 6.0 does NOT support dual CPUs very well at all. Grrrr

 

Retrospect 6.0 doesnt seem to use more than ~2.0 GB RAM. Grrrr

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did the upgrade to tiger server. this solved the problem...but what company is this? they force you to upgrade because they are not able or not willing to fix such a serious problem?!?!

 

i will now look for another backup software. any suggestions? nothing is worse than this piece of buggy software...

 

 

andreas

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  • 3 weeks later...

I am running Retrospect 6.0.212 on Mac OS X 10.4.2 on a Macintosh G4 mirrored drive doors dual 1GHz with 1.75GB of memory. I am getting spinning beach balls where Retrospect loops (Activity Monitor says Retrospect is "not responding"). It can take a half hour or more during these waits. The loops occur when matching against prior sessions (with no visible progress), or when completing the backup before doing the compare. Suddenly Retrospect wakes up and continues the job. During the beach ball time, Retrospect is hogging a CPU and almost no input-output operations are occurring, according the Retrospect. This is really annoying as it is making it incredibly difficult to backup my network of computers (I have the Workgroup version).

 

Please advise how to fix.

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Hi

 

File backup sets require the most memory to process. 2 Million files is a lot too.

 

Have you considered using a removeable disk backup set instead? That may handle the large number of files with less overhead.

 

In either case - get as much RAM as you can for the server.

 

Thanks

Nate

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  • 3 weeks later...

Just found this thread. I'm glad others have this problem too, but I'm sad there has been not patch from Retrospect, just the suggestion to change OS.

 

I've been using Retrospect for years and it has been a solid program. We used Retrospect 6 on OS X Server 10.3.x (upto 10.3.8) all last year to backup a variety of clients with millions of files. It ran very well on an old G4 450Mhz single CPU box with only 1 GB of RAM. I mean it ran very well all year. This old sever crashed in summer (OS drive just failed) so I rebuild the very same server for our fall term with one exception, I used Soft Raid 3.2 to create a bootable mirrored RAID system. I thought I was building in better server practices. Well needless to say Retrospect is now almost unusable. It is so slow in the GUI and there is some kind of problem with the backups I have to restart the client machines after a backup for them and their shares to mount properly.

 

Retrospec people please, please fix this. Our school can't afford to upgrade server software at this time.

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Jusk an update. If the Retrospect App is on an external non-RAID firewire drive it runns slightly better. It still hangs, but not as often and not for as long. What gives? Clearly Retrospect is accessing the drives directly which is not recommended by Apple. It should be irrelivant whether it's on a RAID volume or not.

 

This is an old problem and Dantz should have patched it by now. And no, upgrade your OS is not fixing the internal problem.

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Still no word from Dantz on this?

 

And folks.... this is an issue if you have Retrospect running from drives that are in some RAID configuration (which would be the most likely way someone would set up a real server). It is NOT from too slow because of hardware (We're running on a dual CPU xServe). It is NOT because Retrospect is busy with a backup (as the slowness happens when Retrospect is doing nothing.... just setting up a backup job).

 

And some sales guy has been calling from Dantz wondering if we want to buy a support contract.... I guess my response at this point, is.... what support? I've not been responding to questions from our purchasing on whether we want to buy that support or not. If you want a nice big check, you might want to look into this bug!

 

-Steve

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Quote:

I guess my response at this point, is.... what support?

 


 

You do realize that this web Forum is a community based discussion board, and is not offered by Dantz as any sort of official support channel?

 

If the sales department starts to hear that customers won't buy products/spend money because of known issues such as this, that might light a fire under the engineers.

 

But (perfectly acceptable and understandable) threats to boycott the product won't do much good when they're made here.

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My computers have over a million files on them, so it's not surprising to have 2+ million files on a backup file.

 

I don't want to use a removeable device, because they are in general smaller than an external firewire hard drive. As far as I'm concerned, an external firewire hard drive *is* a removable hard drive. I can buy a large external firewire hard drive for the price I used to pay for a couple of 2GB Jaz cartridges. Since my computers have 200+GB disks, it makes sense to have 500GB backup drives.

 

I have 1.75GB of RAM on this beast and Retrospect is only around 1GB of memory in size. Almost no I/O is going on when Retrospect "hangs." Retrospect just chews up CPU and says (not responding) to Activity Monitor.

 

Best regards,

Arthur

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So, several months pass and EMC/Dantz still refuses to support its Mac os X customers? This issue has still not been resolved! the latest version of retrospect running on 10.4.2 server will back up a raid 0 drive at about 40MB per minute (whether a softraid volume, or made with disk utility). the same system can back up a regular volume at about 400MB per minute.

 

How this can go on for so many months without being addressed??

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Alex, I'm seeing something very different from you. We've got rather modest hardware (single-processor Xserve G5 2.0 GHz, 2 GB RAM, Mac OS X 10.4.2 server) and I'm even seeing over 150 MB per minute backup rate over the network (100 BaseT) of a slow 300 MHz iMac (10.4.2 non-server). For backups local on our server from our RAID 5 internal drives (Apple Hardware RAID card) we are seeing about 270 to 300 or so MB per minute, all to an Exabyte VXA-2 1x10 1u PacketLoader. Could it be that your slowness is caused by a slow processor or backup medium on your Retrospect server? Is there a high load on your server while the backup is happening that could tax the processor or that could cause the disk heads to be seeking wildly?

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I'm seeing 150MB/min or faster network backups *when it is working* on actual backups. But I'm seeing long periods of CPU churn after the initial scan to find changed files, part way through the matching history log process, and at the end of the backup (during closing) before the comparison starts.

 

If it matters, I am backing up to LaCie 500GB d2 Extreme Big Disks. They are actually internal RAID 0 devices inside an external box, but the computer doesn't know that.

 

I look forward to the fix reported as coming soon from michaeln.

 

Thanks.

 

Best regards,

Arthur

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