On Wed, 24 Mar 2004 at 12:49pm, Fernando Serto wrote

> My doubt is... isn't 324.7 K/s for dump rate too slow? I was backing up 1Gb
> of data and it's taking almost 1 hour! does that mean that for 12Gb I'll get
> something close to 12 hours?
> 
> my tapetype is:
> 
> define tapetype DDS-3 {
>     comment "Sony SDT-9000 (DDS-3)"
>     length 11631 mbytes
>     filemark 434 kbytes
>     speed 1139 kbytes
> }
> 
> shouldn't it run at 1139 K/s?

That depends on a lot of variables.  Are you dumping a local disk or a 
remote disk?  How heavily loaded is the disk?  How about the network?  Is 
there anything else on the bus with the tape drive?

> another thing, I tried using compress server best and compress client best
> and I get no difference at all on the backups, same time to run, same amount
> of data, and same tape usage.

I'm assuming that client and server are separate machines, with different 
CPU speeds?  If that's the case, then CPU isn't your bottleneck.  Still, 
you may want to drop back to 'compress {server|client} fast', since 'best' 
chews up *lots* of cycles for not too much more compression in most cases.

> HOSTNAME     DISK        L ORIG-KB OUT-KB COMP% MMM:SS  KB/s MMM:SS  KB/s
> -------------------------- --------------------------------- ------------
> handsoff     -ta/archive 0 11311501131150   --   58:03 324.7  58:06 324.5

Any reason you're not using a holding area?  A holding area can speed 
things up.  You may be scrubbing the tape if your network/disks/CPU aren't 
always keeping up with the tape drive, and that can lead to slow backup 
speeds.

-- 
Joshua Baker-LePain
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Duke University