Re: Snapshot performance
On Fri, Sep 01, 2006 at 04:06:01PM -0700, Skylar Thompson wrote: Kris Kennaway wrote: On Fri, Sep 01, 2006 at 11:08:51AM -0700, Paul Lathrop wrote: Hi all, We're working on deploying a new mail server on FreeBSD 6.1-STABLE. One of the major selling points was the ability to take filesystem snapshots in order to make backups from a consistent filesystem on such a high-traffic system. Unfortunately, when I take a snapshot, performance slows to a crawl - to the point where the system stops responding to network requests (ping, SMTP, etc.). Also, the snapshot takes 10-15 minutes to complete. Is this a typical situation? Will I need to schedule downtime for backups in spite of this nifty new feature? Am I doing something wrong? Time depends on the size of the filesystem - but you are correct that snapshots were not designed with performance in mind (rather, to speed up booting after an unclean shutdown by removing the need to wait for fsck). Kris Are there plans to improve performance of snapshots? Using the freebsd-snapshot port to link FS snapshots to the automounter is pretty nifty, but it does kill I/O performance while that's in progress as the OP mentioned. Unfortunately I don't think anyone is working on it. The closest thing on the horizon is ZFS support which does feature high-performance snapshots. This is still a way off though. Kris pgpQTmIjCScRG.pgp Description: PGP signature
Snapshot performance
Hi all, We're working on deploying a new mail server on FreeBSD 6.1-STABLE. One of the major selling points was the ability to take filesystem snapshots in order to make backups from a consistent filesystem on such a high-traffic system. Unfortunately, when I take a snapshot, performance slows to a crawl - to the point where the system stops responding to network requests (ping, SMTP, etc.). Also, the snapshot takes 10-15 minutes to complete. Is this a typical situation? Will I need to schedule downtime for backups in spite of this nifty new feature? Am I doing something wrong? Could use some advice. Regards, Paul Lathrop Systems Administrator SquareTrade, Inc. signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: Snapshot performance
On Fri, Sep 01, 2006 at 11:08:51AM -0700, Paul Lathrop wrote: Hi all, We're working on deploying a new mail server on FreeBSD 6.1-STABLE. One of the major selling points was the ability to take filesystem snapshots in order to make backups from a consistent filesystem on such a high-traffic system. Unfortunately, when I take a snapshot, performance slows to a crawl - to the point where the system stops responding to network requests (ping, SMTP, etc.). Also, the snapshot takes 10-15 minutes to complete. Is this a typical situation? Will I need to schedule downtime for backups in spite of this nifty new feature? Am I doing something wrong? Time depends on the size of the filesystem - but you are correct that snapshots were not designed with performance in mind (rather, to speed up booting after an unclean shutdown by removing the need to wait for fsck). Kris pgpVdsO0XfXbl.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Snapshot performance
Kris Kennaway wrote: On Fri, Sep 01, 2006 at 11:08:51AM -0700, Paul Lathrop wrote: Hi all, We're working on deploying a new mail server on FreeBSD 6.1-STABLE. One of the major selling points was the ability to take filesystem snapshots in order to make backups from a consistent filesystem on such a high-traffic system. Unfortunately, when I take a snapshot, performance slows to a crawl - to the point where the system stops responding to network requests (ping, SMTP, etc.). Also, the snapshot takes 10-15 minutes to complete. Is this a typical situation? Will I need to schedule downtime for backups in spite of this nifty new feature? Am I doing something wrong? Time depends on the size of the filesystem - but you are correct that snapshots were not designed with performance in mind (rather, to speed up booting after an unclean shutdown by removing the need to wait for fsck). Kris Are there plans to improve performance of snapshots? Using the freebsd-snapshot port to link FS snapshots to the automounter is pretty nifty, but it does kill I/O performance while that's in progress as the OP mentioned. -- -- Skylar Thompson ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) -- http://www.cs.earlham.edu/~skylar/ signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
