On Sun, Nov 23, 2003 at 07:46:32PM -0500, Kurt Raschke wrote:
> ...when amdump runs, the load spikes to between 4.00 and
> 6.00, and the system becomes nearly unresponsive for the duration of
> the backup.  The server is backing up several local partitions, and
> also two partitions on remote servers.

Are you short of RAM?  If the system's paging heavily, that'd
make it crawl too.

> I've tried starting amdump
> with nice and setting it to a low priority, but when gtar and gzip are
> started by amanda, the priority setting is somehow lost.

Not surprising.  Recall that Amanda runs client/server even when
backing up the server's DLE's.  The client-side processes are
descendents of [x]inetd, not of amdump, and so don't inherit the
latter's "nice" level.

> The server
> isn't even trying to back up multiple partitions in parallel,

By this do you mean, "only one DLE at a time"; or "only one DLE
*from the server* at a time, along with remote backups in
parallel"?  If the latter, well, of course there's some amount of
server-side work even for the remote DLEs.  Is the compression
for the remote DLEs client- or server-side?  If the latter,
change "some amount" to "a lot" in the previous sentence :-)

--

|  | /\
|-_|/  >   Eric Siegerman, Toronto, Ont.        erics AT telepres DOT com
|  |  /
It must be said that they would have sounded better if the singer
wouldn't throw his fellow band members to the ground and toss the
drum kit around during songs.
        - Patrick Lenneau