We have been backing up a Linux client with about five million files on
it. The system administrator has told me that he recently updated the
include/exclude files to exclude a portion of /var that accounts for
most of the file. I have not so far been able to verify this be
inspecting the configuration files myself. Ever since the change, we
have been seeing strange and very troublesome behavior. The client
will send about eight gigabytes of data to the server over the course
of about twelve hours. At that point data transfer will slow to a
crawl and all other sessions and processes will perform poorly until
the session is cancelled. We have been through three iterations so
far, transferring about 23 gigabytes from client to server (I stopped
the last one at about 7 gigabytes). About one gigabyte out of the 23
can be accounted for by data written to storage pools. I usually don't
get the various session statistics messages. In the one case where I
did, they reported 0 objects deleted and only 55 objects expired.
I would expect a substantial amount of data movement from client to
server after excluding large numbers of files as the client told the
server to expire the files. However, this would presumably be
comparable to the amount of file status information sent from server
to client each night before the change. This was about a gigabyte.
Our entire TSM database is only about 20 gigabytes. The client code
is at the 5.1.6.0 level. The Linux kernel is at the 2.4.20-24 level.
The TSM server is at the 5.1.7.2 level and runs under OS/390.