Ups, somehow I sent my e-mail twice... But at least now I know about ionice; never needed it, but it's even installed by default (it's part of util-linux, together with mount, fdisk, etc...).

I'm now browsing through the other utilities of this package, full of small jewels. You never stop learning...

Thanks, Eric

On 12/05/2021 23:59, griffin tucker wrote:
there is a tool called ionice that comes with the util-linux package,
which should help other read/write processes if you are multitasking.

ionice shouldn't slow down rdiff-backup if there are no other io
processes going on.

On Thu, 13 May 2021 at 03:08, Eric L. Zolf <ewl+rdiffbac...@lavar.de> wrote:

Hi,

first, I don't see anything surprising in what you describe, so all
normal AFAICJ.

Second, rdiff-backup needs to check each source file/directory and each
target, compare them and then copy (or not), so if you have some 2300
files to backup, that would sound about right. If the target or the
source file doesn't exist, it would give an error.

If the files are small or don't have changes, the lstat happen a lot and
nothing much else; this is typical random access. It gives a much
different access pattern than the copying of bigger files, where more
sequential is typically done to read/write the file's data.

There is no real way to improve the situation, rdiff-backup goes as fast
as it can and I personally don't know an I/O-equivalent of "nice" (and
if you limit the I/O, the backup will be even slower).

You could try the --no-fsync option to improve speed:

    --fsync, --no-fsync   [opt] do (or not) often sync the file system
(_not_ doing it is faster but can be dangerous)

And, yes, the `rdiff-backup-data/increments` directory is used by
rdiff-backup to keep track of file and directory changes.

Hope this helps,
Eric

On 12/05/2021 07:10, Andrei Enshin via Any discussion of rdiff-backup wrote:

Hi rdiff-backup folks,

Since recent, during backing up I can see spike in IOPS up to 500 which exhaust 
limit of a VM. Therefore backup process takes very long. I've straced a bit and 
what I can see is: many failed  lstat() syscalls:
% time     seconds  usecs/call     calls    errors syscall
------ ----------- ----------- --------- --------- ----------------
   42.71    0.040247           9      4608      1420 lstat
   35.41    0.033370          12      2860           getdents
    9.41    0.008865           6      1431           open
    4.63    0.004363           3      1430           close
    4.03    0.003797           3      1431           fstat
    3.75    0.003536           2      1417           getuid
    0.04    0.000039          39         1           unlink
    0.01    0.000013           1         9           read
------ ----------- ----------- --------- --------- ----------------
100.00    0.094230                 13187      1420 total
Seems rdiff-backup checks existence of some file/dir:
10:13:16 lstat("/some/path/rdiff-backup-data/increments/foo/bar", 0x7ffd832fa810) = 
-1 ENOENT (No such file or directory) <0.000020>
After backup is done, there is still no such file.
Seems the part in path -  /rdiff-backup-data/increments/ - is some "config" for 
rdiff-backup and probably it tryies to find something but can't?

What might be wrong in my setup? What would you recommend to check to solve the 
issue if it is issue at all?

---
Best Regards,
Andrei Enshin



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