<Shields up to deflect flames from Mac bigots!>

I have been getting complaints of slow backups from Mac client nodes.

I wanted to examine the possibility that this was not simply the whining
of a population already prone to whine, so I got a Mac OSX 10.3 G4 box
and put it on my desk, and installed TSM 5.3.2 client on it, and sure
enough, it backs up very slowly. They're not just whining; they're
right. A recent incremental took 11 hours, during which time it was
"inspecting files" at a rate of about 3 files/second.

This led me to a statistical analysis of 2 years worth of TSM accounting
data, and it turns out that the throughput of Mac nodes ranges from 3 to
10 times slower than for comparable Windows nodes. Furthermore, Macs
have several times more files than Windows systems, so even if the
throughput were the same, the backups would still take much longer.

Any idea why the backup throughput should be so much worse for a Mac
system than for a comparable Windows system? Or is this just the nature
of the beast?

Roger Deschner      University of Illinois at Chicago     rogerd AT uic DOT edu