Item  n: Concurrent spooling and despooling withini a single job.
Date:  17 nov 2009
Origin: Jesper Krogh <[email protected]>
Status: NEW
What:  When a job has spooling enabled and the spool area size is
less than the total volumes size the storage daemon will:
1) Spool to spool-area
2) Despool to tape
3) Go to 1 if more data to be backed up.

Typical disks will serve data with a speed of 100MB/s when
dealing with large files, network it typical capable of doing 115MB/s
(GbitE). Tape drives will despool with 50-90MB/s (LTO3) 70-120MB/s
(LTO4) depending on compression and data.

As bacula currently works it'll hold back data from the client until
de-spooling is done, now matter if the spool area can handle another
block of data. Say given a FileSet of 4TB and a spool-area of 100GB and
a Maximum Job Spool Size set to 50GB then above sequence could be
changed to allow to spool to the other 50GB while despooling the first
50GB and not holding back the client while doing it. As above numbers
show, depending on tape-drive and disk-arrays this potentially leads to
a cut of the backup-time of 50% for the individual jobs.

Real-world example, backing up 112.6GB (large files) to LTO4 tapes
(despools with ~75MB/s, data is gzipped on the remote filesystem.
Maximum Job Spool Size = 8GB

Current:
Size: 112.6GB
Elapsed time (total time): 46m 15s => 2775s
Despooling time: 25m 41s => 1541s (55%)
Spooling time: 20m 34s => 1234s (45%)
Reported speed: 40.58MB/s
Spooling speed: 112.6GB/1234s => 91.25MB/s
Despooling speed: 112.6GB/1541s => 73.07MB/s

So disk + net can "keep up" with the LTO4 drive (in this test)

Prosed change would effectively make the backup run in the "despooling
time" 1541s giving a reduction to 55% of the total run time.

In the situation where the individual job cannot keep up with LTO-drive
spooling enables efficient multiplexing of multiple concurrent jobs onto
the same drive.

Why:  When dealing with larger volumes the general utillization of the
network/disk is important to maximize in order to be able to run a full
backup over a weekend. Current work-around is to split the FileSet in
smaller FileSet and Jobs but that leads to more configuration mangement
and is harder to review for completeness. Subsequently it makes restores
more complex.



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