[Bacula-users] Windows client performance

"Bacula sucks the vital essence from your computer" says the slogan... and 
somehow it now looks true to me (though not the way it was meant to)

After years of some experience with Linux&Bacula combination, I finally 
started making some experiments with Windows client. After a few very (not 
so nicely) surprising experiencies in production environment, I set up a 
testbech with oldish 2.8 GHz (800 MHz FSB) Dual-Core P4 and 1 GB of memory, 
pata-interfaced 80 GB had drive, gigabit ethernet.
Testbench was running a clean Windows XP sp3 with Winbacula 3.0.3a. No 
antivirus stuff (yet), no real applications, nothing to cause any extra 
mess.

Fileset contains basically /WINDOWS/system32 directory. It's something I 
could find from every system I tried before this testbench.

The very basic test result:

  Elapsed time:           2 mins 35 secs
  Priority:               10
  FD Files Written:       4,648
  SD Files Written:       4,648
  FD Bytes Written:       664,739,011 (664.7 MB)
  SD Bytes Written:       665,458,318 (665.4 MB)
  Rate:                   4288.6 KB/s
  Software Compression:   None
  VSS:                    yes
  Encryption:             no
  Accurate:               no


Then, after adding lowest-level (GZIP1) compression:

Elapsed time:           2 mins 43 secs
  Priority:               10
  FD Files Written:       4,648
  SD Files Written:       4,648
  FD Bytes Written:       308,509,378 (308.5 MB)
  SD Bytes Written:       309,228,685 (309.2 MB)
  Rate:                   1892.7 KB/s
  Software Compression:   53.6 %
  VSS:                    yes
  Encryption:             no
  Accurate:               no

Basically, it takes the same amount of real time to run the same job, and 
some more cpu load, but no peak in workstation's cpu load meter exceeded 
50%.

Any ideas what is the bottleneck here? I think 1GB of memory should be 
enough for XP alone. Some glue makes me think about the disk, but this rate 
is a decade below what to expect from even that old hard disk.



Finally,  for reference purposes I installed antivirus sw (NOD32) to the 
testbench, it drops only about 10% of the rate above:

  Elapsed time:           2 mins 51 secs
  Priority:               10
  FD Files Written:       4,657
  SD Files Written:       4,657
  FD Bytes Written:       665,372,665 (665.3 MB)
  SD Bytes Written:       666,093,882 (666.0 MB)
  Rate:                   3891.1 KB/s
  Software Compression:   None
  VSS:                    yes
  Encryption:             no
  Accurate:               no


My Bacula DIR/SD is a CentOS 5.4 box, old 32-bit piece of junk, a lower 
speed hw than the workstation described above. As a reference, below is a 
sample of backup from a linux box (64-bit CentOS), it's of the same class 
with rates when backing up the SD/DIR machine itself -which obviously limits 
the rate to 11-12MB/s level. Anyway, the samples above were clearly not 
limited by the Bacula server.

  Elapsed time:           8 mins 1 sec
  Priority:               10
  FD Files Written:       7
  SD Files Written:       7
  FD Bytes Written:       5,311,971,015 (5.311 GB)
  SD Bytes Written:       5,311,971,759 (5.311 GB)
  Rate:                   11043.6 KB/s
  Software Compression:   None
  VSS:                    no
  Encryption:             no
  Accurate:               no


So, what's that tough with my Windows clients?

--
TiN 



------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Throughout its 18-year history, RSA Conference consistently attracts the
world's best and brightest in the field, creating opportunities for Conference
attendees to learn about information security's most important issues through
interactions with peers, luminaries and emerging and established companies.
http://p.sf.net/sfu/rsaconf-dev2dev
_______________________________________________
Bacula-users mailing list
Bacula-users AT lists.sourceforge DOT net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users