Actually the information you pulled below has a bug in it that we have asked IBM
to fix. I pointed it out with inline comments below.

Paul Shields
pshields AT bnr DOT ca

In message "Interpreting Backup Stats", ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT edu writes:

>Hi everyone,
>
>
>My main interest is in the area of how much utilization I can expect on
>an FDDI ring during the backup processing.  The sizing tool indicates
>that my configuration (basically only 12 AIX servers with medium to
>large workloads, all on FDDI) will only cause a utilization of about 6%.
>
>I would like to begin by asking if anyone can explain, in detail, what
>the times and rates imply in the following sample of output I obtained
>from a small test on one of my servers:
>
>Total number of objects inspected:   71,256
>Total number of objects backed up:       23
>Total number of objects updated:          0
>Total number of objects rebound:          0
>Total number of objects deleted:          0
>Total number of objects failed:           0
>Total number of bytes transferred:     17.5 MB
>Data transfer time:                    1.76 sec

This next number is totally meaningless. We have asked IBM to remove it from the
report. It commonly gives transfer rates fater than the network medium can
support.
>Data transfer rate:                10,209.08 KB/sec


>Average file size:                  2,565.6 KB
>Compression percent reduction:        69.51%
>Elapsed processing time:            0:04:51
>

The real transfer rate is toal bytes/total time. In your case 17.5MB/4:51
or just over 3 MB/minute or 500kB/s not a bad transfer rate for an ethernet
connected machine with a moderate load. Ethernet maxes out at around 970kB/s

The number of bytes transferred is the actual number of bytes moved across the
wire. If you have compression on than you need to multiply this number to find
the amount of data backed up.

There are three areas of dealy, and delays can happen on both the server and the
client. You did not max out your network for 2 seconds, try hooking a network
monitoring tool to your FDDI backbone so you can watch what happens during
backup.

>This of course is not typical of what my backups will look like on the
>larger servers, some of which have a number of database files over 1GB
>each, however if I can interpret one report, I should be able to interpret
>them all.  Some questions of clarification might be: Is the bytes transferred
>calculated before or after compression?  Is all elapsed processing time
>attributed to the client scanning the file system, or could the server
>count for some of the delay (ie: the other 4:49)?  Since 10,000 KB/sec
>is about the maximum throughput possible on FDDI, can I assume that we
>maxed-out the network for at least 1.76 seconds over the total 4
>minutes, 51 seconds?
>