Timothy J Massey wrote at about 22:46:39 -0400 on Tuesday, April 12, 2011:
> Timothy J Massey <tmassey AT obscorp DOT com> wrote on 04/12/2011 10:13:11
> PM:
>
> > But give it a try first: unless that production server is a 600MHz
> > machine with 512MB RAM and a single SATA spindle, you will most
> > likely be fine (and if you *are* running like that, well, you have
> > other problems! :) ). (Actually, I have one client with servers
> > that are dual-processor 600MHz with 1GB RAM that I back up during
> > the day and the users at this location almost *never* notice.)
>
> To clarify and expand this: they are IBM Netfinity 5600 servers. 2 x
> 600MHz Intel P3 processors, 1GB RAM, and 6 x 18GB SCSI-160 10,000 RPM
> drives in a RAID 5 array with an IBM ServeRAID hardware RAID controller.
> The systems are old and (processor) slow, but the disk performance is
> really pretty good, even today: it'll easily saturate GigE.
>
> My point for this: CPU power matters little on the client side. RAM
> matters, but only once you have enough: depending on the number of files,
> the amount of RAM you truly need is literally in the hundreds of
> megabytes. What *really* matters is I/O and network throughput--and on
> any halfway-decent server with multiple high-RPM hard drives, you will be
> limited by network bandwidth more than anything else.
As I have mentioned before, I have succeeded with just 64MB of RAM of
which only about 20MB is free. I do have swap, but it really doesn't
use much swap. Now I am just backing up "normal" Linux and Windows
worstations and laptops where each backup has maybe a couple of
hundred thousand files and 20-50GB... but it does work... I use the
rsync/rsyncd transfer method and rsync >~ 3.0 is pretty memory efficient as
long as you have a "normal" filesystem without "humongous" numbers of
hard links or "insanely" large numbers of files per directory.
On small systems, I still find the primary limitations are bandwidth
(I backup many machines over 802.11g wireless) and cpu power for
compression (when I use a 500MHz Arm processor).
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