Josh,
You might consider using a Perl script to generate a load-balanced list of
directories then run INCR for multiple items in that list (say 10 at a
time).  This may work, for you as it will use the "selective incremental"
feature (which doesn't update the last-incr-date for the file system), then
once a week (or more) run a normal full-incremental to update the server's
setting for last-incr-date.  (Did you see only one thread on restore, also?
The design doc. says the new multi-thread only works for backup/archive
direction.  Also, this multi-thread/session feature *may* depend on multiple
file systems or file-spec's to get it to run multiple data-flow threads...
also, there are implications for number of available mount points; the
default number of session-threads of two uses one thread for "query info"
and one or more for backup data.)

I saw the problem with compression back in the SJ lab; unfortunately, the
NTFS attributes go with each file, and for TSM client to "copy" a file to
backup/archive storage, the NTFS API decompresses the file on backup, then
recompresses it on restore.  This, combined with progressively degrading
NTFS performance (over huge numbers of files/directories) made the client
CPU the main bottleneck.  You may need 4 CPU's to get decent performance out
of more than one session for restore!  (BTW, is your server still NTFS4?  I
wonder if NTFS5 helps this issue, any.  We are about to start testing on
Win2k restores, so I will post what we learn.)

Don France

Technical Architect - Unix Engineering/P.A.C.E.
San Jose, CA
mailto:dfrance AT pacbell DOT net
PACE - http://www.pacepros.com
Bus-Ph:   (408) 257-3037

 -----Original Message-----
From:   Joshua S. Bassi [mailto:jbassi AT IHWY DOT COM]
Sent:   Thursday, November 16, 2000 11:57 AM
To:     ADSM-L AT VM.MARIST DOT EDU
Subject:        Re: Windows NT Restore Performance

Unfortunately my customer has created one huge data partition with only
one main directory on it.  There are 2000 small directories under that
directory. So there is really no way to run multiple streams against
that.  And to top it off it is not only a compressed NTFS volume, but
a 3-4 disk RAID-5 set, so when I use the GUI for the restore, it only
fires off 2 streams (1 for send & 1 for receive).

Thank you,

Josh