On 2013-02-06 06:56, Sorin Srbu wrote: >> From: Les Mikesell [mailto:lesmikes...@gmail.com] >> You are testing sustained transfer times there. The killer with small >> files is the seek time while the disk head bounces around reading >> little bits of directory and inode data. And once you get started, >> the server has to do approximately the same to check for matches - >> possibly with other backups running. > > I realized that afterwards. I'll be looking for some kind of random test > instead.
No, this is what you want: /usr/bin/time -v find /home -mtime 1 >/dev/null This will generate a list of all files in /home, checking each of their modification times, and throw all the output away. This performs a total directory traversal where each file's inode is checked. This is almost certainly the limiting factor of your rsync. The above spits out a lot of output. You are interested in "User time" (CPU time in userspace) and "Elapsed (wall clock) time". Example from my PC: tyler@baal:~$ /usr/bin/time -v find /home -mtime 1 >/dev/null Command being timed: "find /home -mtime 1" User time (seconds): 0.14 System time (seconds): 0.96 Percent of CPU this job got: 15% Elapsed (wall clock) time (h:mm:ss or m:ss): 0:07.07 Average shared text size (kbytes): 0 Average unshared data size (kbytes): 0 Average stack size (kbytes): 0 Average total size (kbytes): 0 Maximum resident set size (kbytes): 2320 Average resident set size (kbytes): 0 Major (requiring I/O) page faults: 0 Minor (reclaiming a frame) page faults: 1512 Voluntary context switches: 2398 Involuntary context switches: 196 Swaps: 0 File system inputs: 31000 File system outputs: 0 Socket messages sent: 0 Socket messages received: 0 Signals delivered: 0 Page size (bytes): 4096 Exit status: 0 Directory and inode data is cached by the kernel so subsequent runs are faster. You can tune these with sysctl: vm.swappiness vm.vfs_cache_pressure More information (shameless use of my blog): http://www.tolaris.com/2008/09/28/making-the-gui-faster-in-ubuntu-linux/ Regards, Tyler -- "There is no 'eastern' and 'western' medicine. There's 'medicine' and then there's 'stuff that has not been proven to work.'" -- Maki Naro, "The Red Flags of Quackery, v2.0", Sci-ence.org ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Free Next-Gen Firewall Hardware Offer Buy your Sophos next-gen firewall before the end March 2013 and get the hardware for free! Learn more. http://p.sf.net/sfu/sophos-d2d-feb _______________________________________________ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net List: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki: http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/