slow network backup speeds

[sphigel]

Hello,

 

I'm running Retrospect Multi Server v 7.6.123 on Windows Server 2008. I have a backup script that is connecting to another Server 2008 machine running client version 7.6.107. Retrospect server is backing up to the local disk and is backing up the other server over a Gigabit network.

 

Both servers can easily sustain read and write speeds of over 100MB/s but our network tops out at 100MB/s. Now, when I run a backup of this server over the network Retrospect is topping out at around 20MB/s. This is without compression turned on. I am using a Disk backup set and have even tried backing up one single large file that was 40GB. I still got a max transfer speed of 20MB/s. I can look at Task Manager and see that Network Utilization on both machines is about 18%. CPU and Memory utilization is virtually nil.

 

My question then is if Retrospect is somehow limited to this speed or if there is anything I can do to increase the backup speed over the network.

 

I would appreciate any input on this.

 

Thanks!

[mauricev]

I'm using compression (though not Retrospect's) and I'm backing up to a network share. Between Retrospect and our server client, I see just over 16 MB/second between it and our Linux server. The connection to the shares are a little hobbled and we are not using jumbo frames. So I'd suspect if those things were bottlenecks, I'd see more than that, but for something close to 100 MB/s, I doubt it.

[Lennart_T]

I'm guessing it's the hard drive(s) that is/are the bottleneck(s) here.

One of our clients (a server) gets over 1800MB/min to an LTO-3 tape drive. That's over 30MB/s on a gigabit network.

From a client to a NAS server (disk backup set) is of course a bit slower, since we only have one NIC on the Retrospect server.

 

Retrospect 7.6.123, 3 year old Intel Xeon server.

[sphigel]

I'm not exactly looking for 100MB/s but the 20MB/s I'm getting now is a long ways from 100. Even 40 would be great as that would cut my backup times in half. 20 just seems slow to me when the hardware of the servers and network can easily accomodate much more.

[sphigel]

I don't think hard drives can be the problem here. Both of these servers are identical. They run RAID6 and have sustained write speeds around 300MB/s. Well above the 100MB/s limit of our network. I can transfer files between them at 100MB/s over the network. It seems clear that the speed limitation is caused by Retrospect. Again, I'm just wondering if there's any possible way to speed this up.

[Lennart_T]

I don't think hard drives can be the problem here. Both of these servers are identical. They run RAID6 and have sustained write speeds around 300MB/s. Well above the 100MB/s limit of our network. I can transfer files between them at 100MB/s over the network. It seems clear that the speed limitation is caused by Retrospect. Again, I'm just wondering if there's any possible way to speed this up.

Have you tried to copy (in Explorer) from the "source" disk to the "destination" disk? What speed did you get?

[sphigel]

Using explorer and copying from the retrospect client machine to the server I get speeds of 110MB/s which is the max our network will allow.

[Lennart_T]

That's strange. Your network doesn't like Retrospect (or vice versa).

 

If there was something inherently wrong with Retrospect per se, these forums would be filled with complaints. But there are just a few.

 

I'm sorry. I'm out of ideas.

 

Oh, one more thing: This is just a user-to-user forum. You might want to contact support.

[sphigel]

Thanks for your help. I'll try support.