Why does Restrospect slow and use all CPU time?

[mayall]

I've been using Retrospect for many years to backup numerous clients in the office. I've often had the experience of Retrospect "stalling" (spinning cursor) for long periods of time when I cancel an operation but it has always "returned".

 

Recently, Retrospect has been apparently hanging after running for about a day. Using Activity Monitor, I see that Retrospect is using all available CPU time but nothing is happening. I cannot quit Retrospect from the Dock or the Retrospect menu but I can use Activity Monitor to Quit. A Force Quit does not seem to be required.

 

After quitting, I have twice needed to rebuild the catalog.

 

Mac G4

384MB

3 GB free HD space

Miles Ultra SCSI

OS X 10.4.6

Retrospect 6.1.126

Driver Update 6.1.4.103

 

Any ideas?

 

Thanks,

 

Will Mayall

[CallMeDave]

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Any ideas?

 

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You're using a SCSI host adapter that's unsupported in the version of the operating system that's running.

 

You also have very little free hard disk space, but withouth knowing more about your backup configuration (such as what Type of Backup Set you are using) it's hard to say if this is also a problem.

 

Dave

[rhwalker]

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384MB

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Any ideas?

 

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That's a VERY small amount of memory to be running just Mac OS X 10.4.6 (alone), and an EXTREMELY small amount of memory when trying to run a memory-intensive program like Retrospect. You may be thrashing. Try bringing your machine up to at least 1 GB (and even that's a bit small to be running Retrospect on Mac OS X 10.4.x). If you are running Retrospect Workgroup to backup other client machines from this computer, I would suggest at least 2 GB of RAM to avoid thrashing. It's not the days of Mac OS 6 anymore.

 

Russ

[mayall]

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You're using a SCSI host adapter that's unsupported in the version of the operating system that's running.

 

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It's a MilesU2W card. OS X 10.4 is supported with the latest firmware update. The card itself seems to work fine.

 

 

 

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You also have very little free hard disk space, but withouth knowing more about your backup configuration (such as what Type of Backup Set you are using) it's hard to say if this is also a problem.

 

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Although the 3GB seems relatively low, it always seems to be free. There's nothing else running on the machine and the data files are stored on another drive.

 

 

 

Having said that, I will probably swap in another drive.

 

 

 

Thanks for the feedback.

[mayall]

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That's a VERY small amount of memory to be running just Mac OS X 10.4.6 (alone), and an EXTREMELY small amount of memory when trying to run a memory-intensive program like Retrospect. You may be thrashing. Try bringing your machine up to at least 1 GB (and even that's a bit small to be running Retrospect on Mac OS X 10.4.x). If you are running Retrospect Workgroup to backup other client machines from this computer, I would suggest at least 2 GB of RAM to avoid thrashing. It's not the days of Mac OS 6 anymore.

 

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Agreed, 384MB is relatively small, but it does run fine for a day or two. If it is a memory issue, I'd tend to think that there's some poor memory management going on. The computer is running nothing but the OS and Retrospect. 1GB seems a bit overkill. But memory is cheap so I will probably add at least 512MB.

 

Thanks for the help.

[mayall]

I just checked memory use.

 

After running for about 6 hours, 138MB is being used and 248 is free.

 

I do know that after running for a day or two, there is very little free memory. This certainly could be the problem but something doesn't seem quite right.

[CallMeDave]

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It's a MilesU2W card. OS X 10.4 is supported with the latest firmware update.

 

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Not for use with Retrospect it isn't.

 

From KnowledgeBase article #5642:

 

"At this time Dantz does not support the Initio Miles and BlueNote SCSI Adapters on Mac OS 10.3 or 10.4"

 

Is this SCSI card connecting to a backup device for use with Retrospect? Such as a tape drive?

 

If so, then you're attempting to backup to an unsupported hardware device, on a machine with about half the minimum amount of RAM you should have, with a minimal amount of space available for your vmswap files.

 

I'd say a recipe for disaster.

[mayall]

I added 512MB and reverted to Mac OS X 10.3.9. Adding the memory seems to have fixed the problem since it is now running better under 10.3 than it ever did. The primary change is that there are no long pauses when stopping backups.

 

I should have figured out the cause earlier since I had noticed that the "page outs" number in Activity Monitor was high. As an observation, the memory usage of Retrospect varies quite dramatically while performing different tasks.

 

Thanks to everyone for their help.