Michel and bacula users,
So the user with the laptop finally dropped in again this week and we had a chance to pursue why bacula brings his machine to its
knees. We worked through your suggestions and it turned out one of them was right. We turned off Norton Antivirus and everything got
a lot faster. It is configured to check each file access, and was taking 50% of the CPU time to do it. This configuration is a
standard campus-wide thing so I don't think we can change it. Now we want to work out how to schedule things so that the virus
checker is off when bacula runs, and on otherwise.
Thanks for pointing us in the right direction,
Alex
Michel Meyers wrote:
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Alex Finch wrote:
I have a user who is only occasionally in the department, and when he
is I would like to backup his laptop. The full backup happened for the
first time this week, and he sent me this comment:
"When (bacula fd is) running it seems to use all the memory, making
doing almost anything impossible."
I'm not certain on the 'uses all memory' part. I backup about 4 Windows
PCs in a small 100Mbps network through Bacula (a small non-profit org)
and have never received a complaint about the backups slowing their PCs
down. I run concurrent backups with GZIP compression plus spooling and a
spool size large enough to hold the entire backups before streaming them
to tape (the tape drive is an old measly Onstream DI-30 IDE drive that
writes about 3.6Gbytes/hour uncompressed). Two of the machines have full
backups of about 15GB, one is at 11GB (and the last one trails behind
with only 900MB) but given the size of my tapes I have rotated their
schedules so the bigger ones are never backed up in full on the same
day. Also note: As I need these people onsite to change the tapes, the
backups run during the day and as mentioned before, nobody has ever
complained about performance.
That said, having to read all data on a system can bog it down quite a
lot so here are a few things I'd do:
- - Validate that memory usage claim
- - Ensure that the client system has UDMA running properly on all
harddrives (Drives running in PIO modes generate loads of interrupts and
thus bog down the CPU), on Windows you can check this in the Device
Manager (see the IDE controllers' properties there), on Linux this can
be checked with hdparm. This one is important and often overlooked.
- - Check the CPU load of the client during backup (especially if you use
GZIP client compression). Consider disabling software compression if you
see this to be too high (use hardware compression of your drive instead)
- - Check for other things: Is there an antivirus scanner checking all the
files you read? Do you have some CPU intensive firewall software going
nuts with the amount of data transferred over the network. Spyware or
viruses that could be interfering, ...
- - You could experiment with the "Maximum Network Buffer Size" in the SD
and FD (see manual) or try throttling the connection somehow (Does
Bacula have means to do that? I forgot. But using QoS should always work.).
Anyway, hope that's helpful somehow.
Greetings,
Michel
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--
Alex Finch, Research Fellow, Physics Department, Lancaster University.
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