Nils Breunese (Lemonbit) wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> We're running a BackupPC 3.1.0 installation on CentOS 4 32-bit on a
> machine with the following specs:
>
> - Intel Celeron CPU 2.66 GHz
> - 512 MB RAM
> - BackupPC pool on a single 250 GB ATA 133 drive
>
> We currently running one backup at a time ($Conf{MaxBackups} = 1;).
> This already maxes out the iowait%. The machine is also swapping
> sometimes. If we'd want to do more backups simultaneously, how would
> you prioritize the following possible upgrades:
>
> - Dual (or more) core CPU
> - More RAM
> - Faster drive (more drives (RAID)?)
>
> Thanks in advance,
>
> Nils Breunese.
>
I just upgraded my box - got an Asus P5K WS motherboard. 2GB of memory
and a quad core 2.2 GHz cpu for well under a grand. That motherboard
has 2 gig ethernets, 6 SATA ports and a 64 bit PCI slot for my 3ware
controller. A full tower case with a 6 dive cage and a 600W PSU cost
me about $350 a year or two back and a 8 x 500gb Sata disks and 3ware
9500s12 (from ebay) rounded things out to around $2.5K. It's still
mostly IO bound (I don't use compression since most of my data is jpeg
and video from my photo business). It runs FreeBSD 6.3 32bit for
historic reasons (other apps on the machine). Backups of my photo
archive (gig e from a mac pro) now run at 30-40MB/sec.
So my take - if your box is swapping that's the #1 upgrade because that
will kill any server performance and memory is cheap. Next I'd look at
disk, with the right controller more spindles will give you a
performance boost however raid 5 is not a great way to go because of the
cost of doing write splices. I run raid 10, again there is some
performance cost because everything gets written twice. The upside is
reads come from six different spindles in my setup so read performance
is improved (and backup PC is mostly read bound not write because of the
pooling). Lastly CPU unless you are running with a load average close
to or greater than the # of cpu's it's probably not going to gain you much.
John
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