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6.1 Slow Down Systems


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Hello,

 

We are running Retrospect 6.1 on OSX Server with Quantum Superloader 3 taper streamer.

 

OSX X Server

10.4.11

Dual 2.3Ghz PowerPC G5

4GB Ram

 

+ Data Is Stored on Mac Xserve Raid I don't think that drives are problem ...

 

Retrospects started slowing down server a lot ... It makes server pretty much NOT accessible to users.

 

Is there way to configure retrospect to use limited amount of resources ...? I guess it will take more time to finish backup task but Its not a problem for us.

 

BTW .. here are some stats from latest backup

 

Completed: 900000 files, 944.0GB

Performance: 1212.4MB/Minute

Duration: 27.07:21 < 27Hrs isn't that a tad to much ?

 

Thank you

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+ Data Is Stored on Mac Xserve Raid I don't think that drives are problem ...

No way to tell unless you try backing up to a different technology, such as a locally-attached volume.

 

It's a bit unclear from your problem description whether the xServe RAID is the source or the destination or instead whether you are backing up to the attached tape drive, but your backup throughput seems fairly good.

 

Retrospects started slowing down server a lot ... It makes server pretty much NOT accessible to users.

That's the expected behavior. Retrospect tries hard to keep the data moving, which is very important for tape drive backup. If you slow the data to the tape drive, the inter-block gap will increase, which can greatly reduce the tape capacity. If the data pipe to the tape drive becomes too starved, the tape drive will write an EOT and then "backhitch" - rewind / space reverse several blocks, then get a running start to write the next block in sequence at the end of the current data on tape, which will greatly increase the backup time (perhaps by a factor of 10 to 100), and which can greatly reduce the tape life (because of the increased number of passes of the tape over the head).

 

Completed: 900000 files, 944.0GB

Performance: 1212.4MB/Minute

Duration: 27.07:21 < 27Hrs isn't that a tad to much ?

Realize that you have other stuff going on for this server - you haven't given the entire server to Retrospect. It's amazing that it can pump this much data (about a TB) this fast with everything else going on, competing for the server's CPU. Also note that you don't have a whole lot of RAM in that server for two CPUs, running Retrospect as well as acting as a Mac OS X server for a bunch of connected users, with all that entails.

 

Is there way to configure retrospect to use limited amount of resources ...?

No. If Retrospect's slowdown is making the server unusable for other purposes, consider putting Retrospect on its own server, or don't run Retrospect when users need to get stuff done. Retrospect, when it is not running, uses almost zero resources.

 

Russ

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Performance: 1675.7MB/Minute

Personally, I'd be pretty happy with 1.6 GB/min on a busy server. As for the total time, don't forget that Retrospect is actually making two passes on your data: once for backing up and the second for comparing the backup with the source.

 

You could cut the time by not performing the comparison, but that's not something I'd advise.

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