Speed of backups unusably slow

[szinn]

Hello,

 

The speed of our backups is about 20 Mb/s.

After a full weekend of backups, Friday night at 19:00 to Monday morning at 7:00 I backed up 971 GB. That's 16 GB an hour.

 

I have about 5 TB to back up. At this speed it's going to take me:

320 hours or

13 days.

 

With Retrospect 6 I was getting around 250 Mb/s.

 

I've tried reinstalls, all the client versions are updated.... the driver is updated in Retrospect, I don't know what else to do.

 

Has anyone gotten retrospect to back up at a normal speed?

[szinn]

What's interesting, is when I look at the Retrospect interface, it's telling me the performance is:

156 MegaBytes per second

When I look at the actual network traffic coming in through the ethernet port it is:

20 MegaBits per second?

[szinn]

Okay... just doubled my input to my media set.

 

I have 5 backup sources and one large media set. (10TB Raid)

 

I had created one backup set for the raid that was 10TB.

Media Set A

Then I created a script that backed up all the sources to the media set.

 

I just completed a test where I created a media set for a source B.

Media Set B.

 

I started both backup processes, making sure they are on different activity threads and am now getting 43 MegaBits per second.

 

I'm assuming that retrospect is only using one activity thread per backup media set.

 

Is there a way to control this so that Retrospect uses all 8 activity threads for one media set?

[szinn]

Another option would be to allow multiple backups to backup to one media set.

 

Then I could create 5 scripts, one for each source, backing up to one media set.

 

I attempted this, however, Retrospect only allows a media set to be backed up to by one script at a time.

 

I would rather have one large backup set because then I don't have to manage the size of all the backup sets on one volume when I am running out of space.

[szinn]

I just noticed that Retrospect is reporting MB per minute not second.

 

161 MB/m is equal to 2.6 MB/s equal to 21 Mb/s.

 

So what Retrospect is reporting and what my network monitor is reporting matches.

 

This seems to be an Activity Thread allocation issue... if only one thread is running, then all bandwidth should be allocated to that one thread... or all 8 threads used for that one backup job.

[szinn]

I've been running 8.2 for a while and the speed is incredibly fast! Around 150 MB/s! I usually get around 35 MB/s on a FW800 drive.

 

This shows me the speed of 64 bit and fiber. Thank you for the update.

[bioheath]

I am seeing speeds from 700MB/m to a peak of 1.1GB/m with 8.2. This is mac to mac on a very busy network with the standard gigabit gear in Mac Pro systems and Foundry switches in between. I don't think the software is the bottleneck. It seems useable here.

 

I actually kicked off another job, a copy media set script, from a local disk back to itself. While the network task is running at 1.1GB/m on thread 1 the disk-only task is running on thread 2 at around 850MB/m. In this case the network task is faster than the disk based one.

Edited July 30, 2010 by Guest

[Daniels]

I am running one thread of activity on a PowerPC G4 and getting speeds between 21 MB/m and 221 MB/m depending on the machine. I am running a 10/100 BaseT network. I will have better numbers on Monday once the full backup runs over the weekend.

[Daniels]

I just did a full backup over the weekend and I was getting speeds between 148 and 251 MB/min These numbers come from a Dual 867 MHz PowerPC G4 with 2 GB memory on a 100 BaseT LAN. All network connections between the engine and the clients are internal with no communication outside the building.

[darrensen]

Any solution to this problem? I'm having the same issue.

[Daniels]

I think your numbers are off because if you are really getting 20 Mb/s then you getting 1200 Mb/min which would be 72000 Mb/hour and if you translate that into what Retrospect actually reports it would 2.5 MB/s, 150 MB/min, 9000 MB/hour.

I would relook at your numbers and make sure they are correct.

I was getting very slow speeds when I had 6 until I plugged the Retrospect directly into the switch instead of going through the wall.

[rhwalker]

I was getting very slow speeds when I had 6 until I plugged the Retrospect directly into the switch instead of going through the wall.

That would seem to indicate that you've got a bad cable run from your wall outlet, or perhaps that you've got some pair reversal and your switch can't do MDIX properly to your NIC.

 

Russ

[Daniels]

That was a long time ago. I was just pointing out that there could be bad connections resulting in slower speeds. The machine has been plugged directly into the switch for at least 7 years now.

Edited August 3, 2010 by Guest