On 3/14/07, John Pettitt <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > It's time to build a new server. My old one (a re-purposed Celeron D > 2.9Ghz / 768M FreeBSD box with a a 1.5 TB raid on a Highpoint card) has hit > a wall in both performance and capacity. gstat on FreeBSD shows me that > the Highpoint raid array is the main bottleneck (partly because it's in a > regular PCI slot and partly because it's really software raid with crappy > drivers) and CPU is a close second. I'm going to build a new box with > SATA disks and a better raid card.
Yep, a combination of CPU and IO load and capacity is what limits backup speed of the typical BackupPC installation. > So my question: Has anybody does any actual benchmarks on BackupPC servers? Hmm, nothing official here. > Which OS & Filesystem is best? (I'm, leaning toward Ubuntu and RaiserFS) OS doesn't matter. Pick whatever you are familiar with. As far as OS goes, ReiserFS 3 is good because it stores small files very efficiently because of it's tail packing feature. But I usually stick with ext3 because of it's reliability. xfs and jfs are generally used when volumes start getting very large and xfs especially usually handles large file IO very well, but BackupPC's disk workload usually involves lots of small IO so it may not help much there. > RAID cards that work well? Allow for on the fly expansion? 3ware cards seem to be a favorite for SATA setups. I am also a big fan of software RAID on Linux as well. > RAID mode ? 5? 6? 10? 500GB drives seem to be the sweet spot in the > price curve right now - I'd like to get 1.5TB after RAID so 6 drives in > RAID 10. The RAID mode you use will be determined by storage, performance and redundancy requirements. Knowing that multiple disk failures are common enough unless you are very diligent about scanning/monitoring disks for warning signs for large arrays it's often a very good idea to use RAID 6 or RAID 10. Raid 5/6 will not perform well at all for small writes because of the additional reads required to write parity. Also keep in mind that since most disk IO on a BackupPC machine is seek limited, the more spindles you can get working in parallel the better - this usually means RAID 10. But if storage capacity requirements outweigh performance I would go with RAID 6 or 5. I would do your own benchmarks with the various RAID setups to find what works best for you. Make sure you let us know what you find. ;-) > I'm leaning towards a core 2 duo box with 2Gb of ram. That should be plenty of CPU power depending on how many clients you intend to back up in parallel. -Dave ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Take Surveys. Earn Cash. Influence the Future of IT Join SourceForge.net's Techsay panel and you'll get the chance to share your opinions on IT & business topics through brief surveys-and earn cash http://www.techsay.com/default.php?page=join.php&p=sourceforge&CID=DEVDEV _______________________________________________ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
