On Mon, Aug 13, 2007 at 04:25:47PM -0700, Aaron J. Grier wrote:
> I was under the impression that everything (including the index) was
> written to holding disk and moved into the indexdir _after_ the backup
> dumped to tape.

Nope -- dumper.c writes data from the indexfd directly to the index
directory on the server, potentially via a compression pipe.

The other info about the index process was accurate.  sendbackup.c runs
tar and, for every buffer of data it gets back, sends the data both to
the server (on the datafd) and to a running shell invocation of 
  tar -tf - | sed -e 's/^\\.//'
the output of which is also sent to the server (on the indexfd).

Dustin

-- 
        Dustin J. Mitchell
        Storage Software Engineer, Zmanda, Inc.
        http://www.zmanda.com/