Christopher Derr wrote:
>
> I'm a new backuppc user for a college academic department. I have a
> moderately sized disk array (3 TB, RAID 5, Areca RAID) backing up the
> data on various servers.
I think that's the first time I've heard someone call 3 TB "moderately
sized", but I guess times change...
> The backup server has 8 GB of memory and is
> currently running a backup of 350 GB user directories on a Windows 2003
> server with rsyncd. Here's what TOP shows on the backup server:
>
> top - 07:59:11 up 17 days, 42 min, 2 users, load average: 1.06, 0.76, 0.35
> Tasks: 95 total, 2 running, 93 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
> Cpu(s): 12.9%us, 2.8%sy, 0.0%ni, 77.9%id, 6.3%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.1%si,
> 0.0%st
> Mem: 8189252k total, 7891284k used, 297968k free, 21104k buffers
> Swap: 19800072k total, 88k used, 19799984k free, 6361760k cached
That doesn't look bad, but were you running the max number of backup
processes at the time? If you have the sysstat package installed you
can use 'sar' to see snapshots of the system state at 10 minute intervals.
> And here's the main process:
>
> 22277 backuppc 18 0 211m 159m 2340 D 24 2.0 1:45.67 BackupPC_dump
The server process itself doesn't do all the work.
> And the host summary for this host:
>
> Host: UserServer
> #full: 2
> Full Age: 1.2
> Full Size: 345.75 GB
> Speed: 7.29 MB/s
> #incr: 6
>
> I haven't fiddled with the basic configuration at all (write caches, no
> of fulls vs no of incr, etc). How do these stats look to you for what
> I'm doing? There's a Gigabit connection between the backuppc server and
> the Windows box. Last full backup of the UserServer's 345 GB took 787.9
> minutes (13 hours). It is, of course, lots of smaller files. The time
> to back it all up isn't unacceptable at this point, though the
> UserServer will be bumped to 4 TB soon, and I expect usage to climb over
> 1 TB by the end of the year (if you build it, they will come).
Running rsync you should see a big difference between full and
incremental runs.
> What do the experts think about the memory usage and the speed of the
> backup? Any suggestions for improving anything?
One issue is that rsync wants to transfer a complete directory listing
before starting, so it needs a lot of RAM to hold it. You might be able
to break the backups up into smaller subdirectory runs to help with
that, but your 8 gigs may be fine anyway. Another common scaling
problem is with the disk seek speed when dealing with all the hardlinks
between directories. At some point it may be easier to set up a 2nd
backup server than to fight this battle with more expensive hardware or
specialized tuning.
--
Les Mikesell
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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