All,

A member of my team is at a customer site trying to restore 5GB of data on a
NetWare client.  He was called in to do a V2 to V3 upgrade and performance
tuning, but when he got in there he was greeted with a production box
restore that wasn't going well.  As a matter of fact it wasn't going at all!

In the last 48 hours they have only been able to restore 1.3GB of the 5GB
backed up.  The syntax of the original command ran was "restore
machine_name/dnc: -su=y -replace=no".  Unfortunately the restore is moving
unbelievably slow!  At first it was like 1.5 seconds per file comparison and
subsequent restore, now it's up to 5 minutes just to compare a single file
regardless if it's restored or not!

I recommended that he generate a list of the subdirectories that needed to
be restored and then run multiple restores with less files per restore
stream (or even run just one stream and hopefully it'll be faster than 5
minutes per file restored!)  That seemed to work for a while, but then after
restoring a thousand files or so, it bogged way down again.  There is only a
total of 170,000 files to be restored - not a whole lot.

They have tried rebooting the NetWare box but that didn't help.  We aren't
CPU-bound on the client either.  The mainframe folks indicate they are
running business-as-usual and the networking folks indicate that the network
isn't saturated at all.  We tried changing some performance tuning parms via
the performance tuning guide; it helps a little, but it's not still not
processing fast enough.

The biggest problem is that they were running a really old client code -
2.1.0.1G!  I recommended that they download both the latest V2 & V3 clients
for NetWare and have them on hand ready for a possible upgrade if nothing
else works.  Installing the V3 client would buy us the "No Query Restore",
but I don't think that would help us due to the fact that the restore starts
okay, but then for some reason bogs down after restoring x number of files.

Any recommendations I haven't already tried?  What client would be better to
install at this point: V2 or V3?  Any help would be greatly appreciated.

NetWare 4.11 client 2.1.0.1G
OS/390 (not sure what version) server 2.1.0.6 STK 4480 tape drives
TCP/IP communication (not sure what version)


Joshua S. Bassi
Storage Management Team Lead
AIX / ADSM Certified Specialist
Dickens Services Group
(404) 386-9848
jbassi AT gloryworks DOT com
www.TeamDSG.com