emulator Posted August 26, 2007 Report Share Posted August 26, 2007 Does anyone here know if there is ever going to be an intel-native version of the Retrospect client for Mac OS X? Right now, our MacPros backup *almost* as fast as our older G5 servers used to. I wondered why until I opened Activity viewer and found that all Retrospect processes were running as PowerPC, and not Intel. Since the Intel Macs have been out for quite sometime, I think that it's time for an upgrade to the client software to take advantage of the increased speed. Comments welcome, EMC! Marc Hoffman Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
emulator Posted August 28, 2007 Author Report Share Posted August 28, 2007 Replying to my own post..hmmm... Robin, can you comment on this?? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Mayoff Posted August 28, 2007 Report Share Posted August 28, 2007 Yes, we will have a Universal client, but I don't have timeline. An intel native client is probably not going to provide much of a boost in transfer speeds. The speed of the client is typically not the bottleneck. FileIO is your biggest limit along with network speeds, disk speeds, backup device speeds, etc. The client already uses Xcode and not open transport (another bottleneck) when the backup server is Retro for Windows. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
emulator Posted August 29, 2007 Author Report Share Posted August 29, 2007 This is good news! However, just to clear things up for you, the MacPro servers are on the same network connections, same hard drives, same SCSI cards, as the two G5 servers that the intel units replaced. Typically, on the G5s, we got about 1600 megabytes/minute. On the MacPros, we are getting around 1100 megabytes/minute. Yes, it's not THAT big of a difference, but when a complete backup over the weekend takes more that 48 hours, those 500mb/minute do add up. One other thing to note: the Intel MacPros are not identical. They are both dual, dual core Xeons. But one is 2GHz per CPU core, and the other is 2.6GHz per core. The one with the 2.6GHz cores typically backs up faster than the slower unit. However, both Intel units are still slower backing up than the two 2GHz G5 units. Marc Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rhwalker Posted August 29, 2007 Report Share Posted August 29, 2007 One thing to consider is whether paging is slowing down the Intel performance. Because Rosetta is being used to emulate the PPC code on the Intel Macs, you've got Rosetta wallowing in about 1/2 to 3/4 GB of RAM, so you need to allow more RAM for Rosetta to cache its translated PPC code, and for Rosetta itself. So it's not just the emulation that can give you a performance hit, and multiple cores put their own demands on RAM. If you've got gobs of RAM, then this isn't an issue. Russ Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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