Looking for some guidance to improve backup session times.

The time it takes to backup our e-mail servers (4-way processor H70 AIX
4.3.3 with 2GB RAM. TSM client is 4.1.2.0) is becoming unacceptable and
unworkable.

Currently, backup sessions are sometimes taking more than 16-hours (as I
send this, one session that started yesterday evening is still running),
yet the total amount of data backed up is only around 2.5-4GB. The current
session stats shows the first data transfer wasn't until around 3:45 this
morning, yet the backup session started around 6PM, YESTERDAY.

Yes, I understand the LARGE amount of OBJECTS INSPECTED is an issue. But,
the current data tells me it took over 8-hours from the start of the
schedule to when it actually transfered any data from the client to the
server (OS390 TSM 4.1.3).

Here is a end-of-schedule snippet from a previous days run. Note, it
started at 6PM and finished at 9AM the next day. When it actually did any
work, it went pretty fast:

08/23/01   09:00:37 --- SCHEDULEREC STATUS BEGIN
08/23/01   09:00:37 Total number of objects inspected: 8,521,197
08/23/01   09:00:37 Total number of objects backed up:  105,231
08/23/01   09:00:37 Total number of objects updated:          0
08/23/01   09:00:37 Total number of objects rebound:          0
08/23/01   09:00:37 Total number of objects deleted:          0
08/23/01   09:00:37 Total number of objects expired:     32,662
08/23/01   09:00:37 Total number of objects failed:           7
08/23/01   09:00:37 Total number of bytes transferred:     2.83 GB
08/23/01   09:00:37 Data transfer time:                5,685.47 sec
08/23/01   09:00:37 Network data transfer rate:          522.69 KB/sec
08/23/01   09:00:37 Aggregate data transfer rate:         55.16 KB/sec
08/23/01   09:00:37 Objects compressed by:                   51%
08/23/01   09:00:37 Elapsed processing time:           00:02:48
08/23/01   09:00:37 --- SCHEDULEREC STATUS END
08/23/01   09:00:37 --- SCHEDULEREC OBJECT END BACKUP.MAIL 08/22/01
18:00:00

The "Elapsed processing time" is confusing. Is it trying to tell me it
only took 3-minutes to actually transfer the 2.83GB ??

What can we do to improve these times ?   Is INCRBYDATE going to make that
much of a different, considering we will still have to do some kinda full
backup, anyway ?

Any and all suggestions will be seriously considered !

===========================
Zoltan Forray
Virginia Commonwealth University
University Computing Center
e-mail: zforray AT vcu DOT edu
voice: 804-828-4807