Amanda-Users

How to force amanda to serialize dumper/taper

2006-12-06 15:52:56
Subject: How to force amanda to serialize dumper/taper
From: Evan Harris <eharris AT puremagic DOT com>
To: amanda-users AT amanda DOT org
Date: Wed, 6 Dec 2006 14:34:31 -0600 (CST)

I'm having a problem with my tape drive shoe-shining because the holding disk can't keep up with the tape drive if it is also being written to by a dumper. Without the extra disk seek overhead of dumpers writing to the holding disk at the same time, the holding disk should be plenty fast enough to keep the tape drive streaming.

Is there any way I can force amanda to serialize the dumper/taper so that they are never run concurrently? I've already set inparallel to 1, but that only affects how many dumpers can run, not the taper.

I've also tried increasing the tapebufs parameter to 8000 (256MiB) to see if that would at least let the drive stay streaming for longer periods, but if it made any difference, it wasn't significant. What thresholds does the taper use to decide when the tapebufs are filled enough to start tape motion? There doesn't seem to be any docs on that, or settings to customize.

I did get a suggestion that I should just leave the tape out of the drive, let the dumpers fill the holding disk and then load the tape and run amflush, but that doesn't really work when using a changer, plus the holding disk isn't large enough for the total size of all the backups, though it can fit them one-by-one.

Seems like there should be a "speed" config option for holding disks like there is for network interfaces and tape drives, so that amanda could test to see if the holding disk can't handle dumpers using the holding disk at the same time a taper is running. That seems like it'd solve the problem nicely, and even seems to fit with the scheme amanda uses for network interfaces.

Thanks.

Evan