kevinpoole Posted January 17, 2010 Report Share Posted January 17, 2010 Yesterday, I installed the latest version of Retrospect Server 8.1 on a Mac Pro 2.66 with Mac OS X 10.6.2, and the client software on two Xserve 8-cores with Mac OS X Server 10.5.8. The two servers have a combined total of 12 TB of files to back up, and I decided to make a break from tape by setting up a JBOD eSATA enclosure with fifteen 2 TB drives, connected to the Mac Pro via eSATA port multiplier. Being a prior user of Retrospect 5 and 6, and more recently of BRU 1.2, I was anticipating backup speeds over the network that would come close to saturating the real-world bandwidth of our Gigabit Ethernet network, especially since the backup media were relatively speedy eSATA disks. At first, I was horribly disappointed by Retrospect's performance. With disk grooming and deduplication turned off, the fastest speeds I achieved over the network were in the range of 435 MB/min, which is only 58 Mbps -- not even reaching the performance of 100 Mbit Ethernet, let alone Gigabit. After much experimentation, I determined that the Retrospect client was the bottleneck, since running Retrospect Server backups locally on the client machines onto eSATA drives achieved speeds in the range of 3.5 GB/min, and copying files over AFP from the servers was well within the normal Gigabit Ethernet expectations. As an alternative to connecting through the Retrospect client software, I instead set up AFP share points on the Mac servers as backup sources, using Retrospect Server's "Shares" feature. The next time I ran a backup, the performance jumped to an average of 2.4 GB/min, or 328 Mbps. That's less than I was originally hoping for with D2D, but it'll work fine for now, and it's faster than the backups I was performing with BRU to an LTO-3 library. So, my question is: why is the Retrospect client such a bottleneck? If I hadn't been able to find a workaround to its slowness, I would've had to have given up on Retrospect 8, which otherwise has a lot of great features (like the ability to essentially create a homebrew Virtual Tape Library without the massive expense of an enterprise-grade VTL unit). I hope some serious improvements to the client are forthcoming. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kevinpoole Posted January 17, 2010 Author Report Share Posted January 17, 2010 One more suggestion for improving performance: by default, the max. usable capacity of media set members is set to 100%. After running my first backup overnight onto my hard drive members, I discovered that it slowed to a crawl once the first hard drive reached capacity -- down to only 60 MB/min, in fact. I stopped the backup and set the max. capacity on the members to 95%, but things went south when I tried to run the backup again; it kept asking for a new member and wouldn't recognize the existing ones. So, I recycled the whole set and started again with 95% capacity. It's running right now, and I'm hoping for the best. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
baweeks Posted January 22, 2010 Report Share Posted January 22, 2010 If you set the "client" as an AFP share, will Retro 8 back up all the hidden files, etc., on the "client"? I just don't know. -baweeks Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kevinpoole Posted January 22, 2010 Author Report Share Posted January 22, 2010 That's a very good question. I'm not backing up bootable volumes, so all I care about are the visible files. Someone would need to do an experiment to confirm whether invisible items are being included. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
rhwalker Posted January 22, 2010 Report Share Posted January 22, 2010 No, that's not the question. There are some parts of the filesystem (e.g., /private/var/etc, which is the target of a symbolic link for /etc) that aren't accessible from a shared volume, unless the true root is shared, which is not usually easy to do (but can be done). Russ Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kevinpoole Posted January 22, 2010 Author Report Share Posted January 22, 2010 Ah, yes -- very true. I certainly wouldn't count on being able to create bootable volumes using the AFP method. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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