Hi Dustin,

Quote: "Perhaps Amanda's not *writing* data very quickly at that point - maybe 
your tape drive is shoe-shining?"

What do you mean by "shoe-shining"?

Best,
Valeriu

On Wed, Sep 15, 2010 at 10:17:04PM -0500, Dustin J. Mitchell wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 15, 2010 at 8:08 PM, Valeriu Mutu <[email protected]> wrote:
> > /dev/mapper/cronos-amanda-holdingdisk
> > ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ??886G ??116G ??726G ??14% /data3
> > /dev/mapper/cronos-amanda-diskbuffer
> > ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ?? ??394G ??199M ??374G ?? 1% /data4
> 
> 350G seems a bit large for a disk buffer - what part size are you using?
> 
> > When the problem re-occurs, I change the MTU to a different value: if it's 
> > 9000bytes, I change it to 1500bytes, and vice-versa.
> >
> > Does anyone know why this happens? Why does Amanda become slow at reading 
> > from the holding disk residing on an iSCSI volume?
> 
> I don't know much about iSCSI, but as you know Amanda just accesses
> the disk via the normal filesystem, so I suspect that you could see a
> similar phenomenon with any application that is reading from or
> writing to the partition.
> 
> Perhaps Amanda's not *writing* data very quickly at that point - maybe
> your tape drive is shoe-shining?  Interrupting the connection by
> resetting the MTU (and I don't see why this would interrupt the
> connection..) would allow several layers of buffers to flush,
> resulting in a surge of read activity when connectivity is restored,
> until the buffers are again full.
> 
> It sounds like there are some unresolved network issues with iSCSI, if
> the iptables is causing problems with multipathing.
> 
> I would recommend taking a hard look with tcpdump to see what's going
> on.  You'll always learn something!  I've found some people who were
> complaining vociferously that Amanda's throughput "sucked", when in
> fact their network had a high packet loss rate because their server
> was hooked into a hub with a massive number of collisions.  Hopefully
> your situation isn't quite that dire..
> 
> Dustin
> 
> -- 
> Open Source Storage Engineer
> http://www.zmanda.com

-- 
Valeriu Mutu

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