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Retrospect causing poor PC performance


nurquhar

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I have been using retrospect 7.6 on my PC for several months without problems, well except one !!!

When the application is open the response of the PC becomes hesitant. ie when I move the mouse it does'nt move straight away but jumps to the new position. Similary if you click on another window it takes a second or two to change the focus to the new window. This kind of makes the PC unuable to an impatient man. However the performance of the backups seem to be fine. I guess the problem is just in the user interface process rather than the background backup stuff.

 

This problem is not usually an issue for me as the application is only usually open doing backups while I am sleeping.

 

However I am now wondering if this has any connection with my new problem with with error -116. ???

 

see http://forums.dantz.com/showpost.php?post/125197/

 

 

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When the application is open the response of the PC becomes hesitant. ie when I move the mouse it does'nt move straight away but jumps to the new position. Similary if you click on another window it takes a second or two to change the focus to the new window. This kind of makes the PC unuable to an impatient man.

This is the expected behavior. Retrospect (and any backup program, for that matter) tries hard to keep the pipe full for the destination device. If you are backing up to tape, the tape capacity and tape life will go down drastically if the data is not pumped out at full speed to the tape device. Why? The tape is always moving. As a first attempt to keep the tape moving, the tape drive will increase the inter-block gap lengths, thus reducing the data capacity of the tape. If the slowdown gets too great, then the tape will write an EOT, back up a bit over previously-written data, get a running start, and then start writing again after the last block previously written. This "backhitching" (backup, then go forward again) decreases the tape life (tapes are only rated for a certain number of passes over the head).

 

However I am now wondering if this has any connection with my new problem with with error -116. ???

No connection.

 

Russ

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I agree it might be expected behaviour while it is busy trying to move lots of data quickly. But should I expect it when no backup script is running ?

 

ie If I just open retrospect on my screen it is doing this. Indeed if I have windows media player playing some music and I open retrospect the sound starts "stuttering" as soon as the splash screen shows and continues until I close the application.

 

What is retrospect doing when it has nothing to do that is hogging my PC ?

Its not a low spec m/c either !, ie its 2.66GHz Intel Core2 Quad with 4gb ram, 160GB sys drive and 2TB of Mode10 Raid storage.

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But should I expect it when no backup script is running ?

 

ie If I just open retrospect on my screen it is doing this. Indeed if I have windows media player playing some music and I open retrospect the sound starts "stuttering" as soon as the splash screen shows and continues until I close the application.

This is new information that would have been helpful in your original post. No, this does not seem normal.

 

Do you perhaps have a proactive backup scheduled such that Retrospect is always trying to find clients to update?

 

Do you perhaps have Retrospect scheduled to do frequent grooming of its backup sets?

 

Russ

 

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I think I did say I was getting this problem when "the application is open", ie when the Retrospect Interface application is on the screen. However I am greatfull for your suggestions so lets discuss them.

 

1. I have no proactive backups setup. I just use retrospect to backup my desktop PC to a NAS drive.

2. The only scheduled operations are backup scripts which run overnight only.

 

It seems to me that the retrospect is UI doing some task every 4 seconds which is causing the problem.

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:banana: Found the problem !

 

I pulled the CDROM drive from the machine and all reverted to normal !!

 

It seems Retrospect must be constantly "pinging" the CDROM drive for some reason, even when there nothing for it to do with the drive.

 

For some reason on my PC when you put I cd into the drive the machine "stutters" a few times while it checks what was put in. Although this is little irritating its not a big issue it your not putting CD's in your drive all day long.

 

As I don't need to use the CDROM drive as a backup device is there anyway to get Retrospect to "ignore it" so I can put the drive back in my m/c ???

 

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