Macina, Conrad wrote:
> Another possibility: What do you know about the file systems being
> backed up when the speed drops? NetWorker (and most other backup
> software) has problems with "millions of tiny files" save sets because
> each file must be recorded in the index database, resulting in
> considerable overhead on the host system. If that's the case, I'm afraid
> there's no easy solution, other than block-level backups (SnapImage).
No, nothing unusual about these filesystems - typical file distribution
for the most part, and the Oracle dumps are very large files, so
filesystem meta overhead didn't really apply here.
Yaron Zabary wrote:
My bet is that the file system of the adv_file (ext2/ext3) is having a
problem with allocating new blocks to the saveset. What do you see with
vmstat ? Try
I think this got truncated, but I didn't see anything particularly
unusual. Filesystem is ext3, and was only about 11% full.
I have about 10 Netapp filesystems I will be backing up via NFS, which
it is intended will happen on the Networker server. Should I be
backing them up via other hosts instead?
No. you should invest some money in NDMP licenses and backup over the
network. It works much better than NFS. You should have some processing
power on the server for running this, but other than that, it is a
better solution.
The client decided not to pursue using NDMP due to the added cost, and
was not concerned with the performance issue of NFS - but it was not
expected to run this poorly. And for reference I'm backing up the
nightly.0 snapshots.
FYI, as I mentioned in my last e-mail, I backed out to 7.3.2 Build 11.
The Oracle FS had no problem, but when another group kicked it, the
nsrmmd kit 99% CPU again. Eventually I decided to kill the nsrmmd and
let Networker restart it. It did so, but took a little while before it
would use the adv_file volume again. Once it did, it kicked back to full
speed again. But after a while, it slowed back into the sub-1KB/s range
again, although nsrmmd was not using CPU. When the Oracle dump backups
kicked in again, it went full speed and completed that pretty quickly,
then slowed down again, with only two NFS filesystems being backed up.
At times it would get a speed burst, but it wouldn't last long. It did
finally finish though.
-Brian
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