Moshe -
I have seen huge delays between volumes as well.  What is going
on is this.  After NBU starts the NDMP backup, it steps out 
of the way and idle until the filer signals NBU that the dump 
has completed.  Then the filer sends all the meta data to NBU
and NBU then catalogs that data.  Depending on the size of your
backup and the amount of files, it takes a little while for NBU
to chug through the catalogs.  Hopefully, 4.5 is faster at this.
Check your iostat -x and look for the activity on your catalogs 
after the filer finishes sending the NDMP job, but NBU still 
shows it to be active.  The only way around this is to use 
multiple streams.  Be carefull, multiple streaming does use the 
filer's CPU more than normal.

Hope this helps.

John


Moshe Linzer wrote:
> 
> Lately we have started seeing delays between volumes when backing up our
> Netapp filer.  I have a single AIT-2 tape attached to my F760, and I run
> a full backup of the filer, which contains 3 volumes.  The performance
> on the first volume is as expected, but then there is a delay of
> sometimes up to 12 hours before the second volume begins to be backed
> up!  The same thing happens before the third volume.  volume sizes are
> between 375-480GB.  I think this began after we applied some patches
> lately, but the patch descriptions don't seem to have any bearing on
> this problem.  Had anyone seen this type of behaviour?
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Moshe
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Veritas-bu maillist  -  Veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu
> http://mailman.eng.auburn.edu/mailman/listinfo/veritas-bu

-- 
  +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+
 + John D Stephens    ITS Design Systems   +
+ Texas Instruments  12500 TI BLVD, Dallas  +
 + jstephens AT ti DOT com     214-480-6229       +
  +=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+=+