At one point I was tempted to do this, with a client who backs up
1tb/night. But it would not help, in fact things got slower as the
numerous processes competed with each other and created worse disk I/O
contention on BOTH the client and the server. Bandwidth utilization
measured at the client NIC actually declined. You might have heard me
whining about this problem on this list back in February of this year.

What was effective, was attacking the backup performance problem at its
source, by tuning the disk I/O subsystems on both the client and the
server. At the server level, I had to work on both the disk storage pool
which that client was backing up into, and the TSM database.

There are no silver bullets here, but there might be bronze bullets -
look at raising your TSM DB bufpoolsize, and also your OS' settings for
disk buffers on the TSM disk storage pool volumes. More effective than
that, however, was simply buying more disk drives for both the database
and the storage pool, and spreading the I/O load out farther.

The disk tuning worked. This client is now backing up in a reasonable
time with RESOURCEUTILIZATION 10. But I watch it carefully. One of my
key measures of TSM server performance is how long this huge client
takes to back up.

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



On Mon, 5 Jun 2006, James R Owen wrote:

>Andy, et al.
>[Is anyone out there using RESOURCEUTILZATION n w/ n > 10 ??]
>
>Andy Raibeck's presentation @ Oxford's 2001 TSM Symposium
>       http://tsm-symposium.oucs.ox.ac.uk/2001/papers/
>       Raibeck.APeekUnderTheHood.PDF
>includes this table showing what will result from setting:
>
>RESOURCEUTILIZATION n Max.Sess. ProducerSess. Threshold(Seconds)
>--------------------- --------  ------------  ------------------
>       <default>       2               1               30
>       1               1               0               45
>       2               2               1               45
>       3               3               1               45
>       4               3               1               30
>       5               4               2               30
>       6               4               2               20
>       7               5               2               20
>       8               6               3               20
>       9               7               3               20
>       10              8               4               10
>  (undocumented:
>       11<=n<=100)     n               0.5n            10
>
>and also includes these warnings:
>Undocumented, internal values subject to change without notice.
>RESOURCEUTILIZATION > 10 is unsupported.
>
>Management discourages use of undocumented/unsupported settings,
>but I'm arguing that we need to specify RESOURCEUTILIZATION 30
>in order to effect efficient backups for our email servers:
>       4 IMAP servers, each w/4 CPUs, running linux client 5.2.3,
>       each backs up 15 FS sending ~200GB/night (compressed)
>       via 100Mb -> Gb ethernet
>       to our TSM 5.2.3 service's disk stgpool
>
>With RESOURCEUTILIZATION 10 specified, we never see more than 8
>simultaneous FS backups, and some of 8 large IMAP filesystems are
>always the last backups to start, serially after other smaller FS
>backups complete!  Testing w/ RESOURCEUTILIZATION 30 causes one
>client to start up 31 sessions enabling all 15 FS backups to start
>essentially simultaneously.  I expect the smaller FS backups will
>complete first w/ the 8 larger IMAP FS backups completing later, but
>w/ all FS backups for each client finishing faster because none will
>wait to start serially after other FS backups because insufficient
>backup sessions were started.
>
>Asking only for your own advice, recognizing IBM probably does not
>allow you recommend using unsupported/undocumented optional settings:
>
>Is my understanding of the unsupported/undocumented setting (w/ N>10)
>correct?  Are we risking some unanticipated problems trying to use
>RESOURCEUTILIZAION 30 to backup all four of these email servers
>simultaneously?  [I believe we have sufficient network bandwidth,
>disk I/O capacity and CPU's for TSM clients and service.]
>
>Is there some important reason that IBM did not choose to document
>and support N>10 for RESOURCEUTILIZATION?  [The higher settings would
>seem to be useful and appropriate for some high-bandwidth circumstances,
>or did I miss something?]
>
>Is there a simple way to specify the order in which FS are selected for
>backup when multi-threading is active?
>
>Thanks [hoping] for your advice!
>--
>Jim.Owen AT Yale DOT Edu   (203.432.6693)
>