Quoting Gaddy <xy.0815 AT GMX DOT NET>:

Hi NetWorkers,

in our installation we run both online and offline
backups of our Notes (V6.5.2) servers.
While online backups work very well (most of the time)
(main reason for doing this is: parallelism)
we are facing some performance issues with the offline
< plain file system >  backup of these servers.

All notes data resides in one - quite large - filesystem,
directory structure is almost flat.

For ~450GB Notes file system it takes more than 15 hrs to finish the
offline backup, which is much more it should.

Environment:
all data on CX700, FC-2Gbps attached to client and server,
details: Meta-Lun of 2x RAID-5 Luns = 2x [4+1]
LTO-2 FC-2Gbps attached to server
1 Gbit Ethernet
no CPU shortages on client and server
client compression is OFF
everything is on Win2k+3

Fore even more details see savegroup completion below.

To speed up the backup we decided to parallelize the file system backup
manually. 'save -M' would be the best choice, but does not realy
support restores (BTW, who cares about restores :-)
So we configured 4 groups with 4 different directives,
each directive skips some portion of the filesystem,
ie:
<< E: >>
+null: [a-k]*.nsf [r-z]*.nsf  <-- backup l*.nsf ... t*.nsf
+null: ... more file types here

This works well but has not improved backup speed significantly.
So I'm a bit clueless now:
- servers have enough resources
- all pipes (LAN, SAN) are fat enough
- drives (disk, tape) should have enough power
but still this is very slow :-(
(BTW, no problem of doing Oracle backups >50MB/sec in the same environment)

Just before I start to rack "my" brain,
I'd like to ask for some hints where to start the investigation first.
How are you doing backups of large filesystems?
(sure we can do LANfree, Snapshot, etc. but have decided to speed up
the filesystem backup 1st)

Tips are much appreciated.

Thanks -sg-
--
Steffen Gattert; VISIOPLANT Hamburg

-------- savegroup completion msg of one group ------
pls. note the backups of "E:\" on x01 & x02 & x03
backup of "E:\" is about 25% of whole file system
4 groups backing up "E:\" on x01 & x02 in parallel
1st: [a-f]*.nsf, ...
2nd: [g-k]*.nsf, ...
3rd: [l-r]*.nsf, ...
4th: [s-z]*.nsf, ...
with 5 min. timeshift between each group

NetWorker savegroup: (notice) Lotus_Notes_Server_A_F completed
Start time:   Fri Feb 17 00:33:03 2006
End time:     Sat Feb 18 06:48:09 2006
--- Successful Save Sets ---
 xxxxxxxx01: C:\    level=full,   1426 MB 01:49:19  17770 files
 xxxxxxxx01: D:\    level=full,   4238 MB 02:01:31    689 files
 xxxxxxxx01: E:\    level=full,    141 GB 16:04:51  10370 files <--!!!
 xxxxxxxx01: SYSTEM_STATE:\ level=full, 13 MB 00:00:21     17 files
 xxxxxxxx01: SYSTEM_DB:\ level=full, 874 KB 00:00:13     11 files
 xxxxxxxx01: SYSTEM_FILES:\ level=full, 227 MB 00:09:20   1848 files
index:xxxxxxxx01 level=full, 32 MB 00:00:33    164 files
 xxxxxxxx02: C:\    level=full,   2468 MB 03:46:28  18397 files
 xxxxxxxx02: D:\    level=full,   4844 MB 02:20:18   1137 files
 xxxxxxxx02: E:\    level=full,    124 GB 22:19:15   5128 files <--!!!
 xxxxxxxx02: SYSTEM_STATE:\ level=full, 13 MB 00:02:02     15 files
 xxxxxxxx02: SYSTEM_DB:\ level=full, 895 KB 00:02:23     11 files
 xxxxxxxx02: SYSTEM_FILES:\ level=full, 226 MB 00:10:50   1841 files
index:xxxxxxxx02 level=full, 57 MB 00:00:25    166 files
 xxxxxxxx03: C:\    level=full,   1389 MB 00:52:05  15325 files
 xxxxxxxx03: D:\    level=full,   8792 MB 03:11:47   1314 files
 xxxxxxxx03: E:\    level=full,    118 GB 22:13:57   4532 files <--!!!
 xxxxxxxx03: SYSTEM_STATE:\ level=full, 12 MB 00:02:15     15 files
 xxxxxxxx03: SYSTEM_DB:\ level=full, 889 KB 00:02:06     11 files
 xxxxxxxx03: SYSTEM_FILES:\ level=full, 226 MB 00:11:00   1800 files
index:xxxxxxxx03 level=full, 49 MB 00:00:24    122 files
 xxxxxxxx04: C:\    level=full,    746 MB 00:42:11  11025 files
 xxxxxxxx04: D:\    level=full,    917 MB 00:32:32   9819 files
 xxxxxxxx04: E:\    level=full,     18 GB 04:40:51   1755 files
 xxxxxxxx04: SYSTEM_STATE:\ level=full, 12 MB 00:02:11     15 files
 xxxxxxxx04: SYSTEM_DB:\ level=full, 877 KB 00:02:06     11 files
 xxxxxxxx04: SYSTEM_FILES:\ level=full, 226 MB 00:10:36   1820 files
index:xxxxxxxx04 level=full, 11 MB 00:00:10     96 files

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