tmassey AT obscorp DOT com wrote at about 09:37:16 -0500 on Wednesday, November 
26, 2008:
 > "Jeffrey J. Kosowsky" <backuppc AT kosowsky DOT org> wrote on 11/26/2008 
 > 02:15:43 
 > PM:
 > 
 > >  > I'm still not sure why people say they need multi-GB of RAM and 
 > multi-GHz 
 > >  > CPU's for their BackupPC servers.  I *just* don't see why:  I've got 
 > a 
 > >  > pool >600GB on a *tiny* box (without compression, anyway).  Maybe if 
 > >  > you've got >1TB of pool data or multi-millions of files you *might* 
 > need a 
 > >  > little more RAM (and I don't think that is the case), but I *still* 
 > don't 
 > >  > see why you'd need more than 1GB of RAM, and still no more CPU power. 
 > 
 > >  > Again, you need a many-drive RAID array *way* more than you do need 
 > CPU or 
 > >  > RAM.
 > >  > 
 > >  > Maybe I'm the only person who's running BackupPC on a box this small. 
 >  But 
 > >  > I've got about a *dozen* of these boxes scattered around various 
 > clients, 
 > >  > backing up between 10 and 600GB of data.  They *all* run flawlessly.
 > >  > 
 > > Well, there are definitely people running BackupPC on smaller
 > > systems...
 > > 
 > > A number of people are running BackupPC on small embedded systems like
 > > the d-link DNS-323 NAS device.
 > > That device has only 64MB of RAM of which 16MB is used as a ramdisk!
 > > It uses an arm processor running at about 400-500MHz and I don't think
 > > it even has a floating point processor.
 > 
 > OK, that redefines "tiny".  Anyone running it on a cell phone?  :)
 > 
 > Actually, my 2-year-old Treo 700p has the same CPU and memory!  How about 
 > a Linksys *router*? :)
 > 
 > > Now at that level, I have found that memory makes a difference when I
 > > try to rsync the pool since rsync compiles a list of all the hard link
 > > inodes and that takes up (some) memory...
 > 
 > We're just talking about running BackupPC normally, not rsyncing the 
 > entire pool.  Is your box configured for swap?  If so, does it swap while 
 > doing a backup?  If not, then I feel guilty about *wasting* all that RAM: 
 > after all, I'm giving it 512MB!  :)
 > 
 > Tim Massey

I have loaded it on the box and run it, but in practice, I run
BackupPC on my Linux server and keep the pool on the NAS using NFS.

Interestingly, I have found that it is *faster* to make even a *local* rsync
copy of the pool by doing it over nfs rather than by doing it purely
local on the dns-323 -- the reason is that the memory intensivity of
such rsync copies outweighs the bandwidth limitations of my 100mbs
link.


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