On Wednesday 28 August 2002 13:20, Amy Tanner wrote:
>On Wed, Aug 28, 2002 at 01:06:37PM -0400, Gene Heskett 
(gene_heskett AT iolinc DOT net) wrote:
>> It rather sounds like you need to allow more time for the
>> process to run.  Thats configurable with a couple of variables
>> in your amanda.conf file, along with some explanatory test
>> describing them.
>
>I did check the dtimeout value.  It was set to 3600, which seemed
> like it should be enough.  I'll increase it to 7200 and see what
> happens.

3600 certainly does seem like enough, thats ten hours!

What about the etimeout value?  Thats the amount of time allowed 
forf the estimate phase's report to come back.

>If the dump is timing out, shouldn't amanda properly kill the
> processes though?

Thats a question for J.R.J. I'm afraid, John?

>> >I'm using dump with hardware compression (no software
>> > compression) > > on
>
>all machines & file systems.  > > The use of hardware compression
> as opposed to software compression > can also be a course of
> 'gotchas'.  When hardware compression is > used, amanda doesn't
> have a very good idea how much data a tape can > hold, so you
> have to set the tape capacities conservatively, which > on big
> tapes can result in gigabytes of under utilization.
>
><snip>
>
>I've read about the advantages of software compression over
>hardware compression and I agree.  I'm not the primary amanda
>administrator - I'm just filling in while he's gone and attempting
> to fix the problems - but I will make the recommendation to
> switch.
>
>Will the using hardware compression cause the dumps to take
> longer?

Not normally because the hardware usually doubles the bandwidth the 
drive can handle at its input when its on.  In the real world, 
software can beat that, when measured in terms of raw input from 
the disks, back to raw output to the disks IF the time to do the 
software compression/decompression is removed from the timeing 
measurements.  And thats the only fair bandwidth comparison IMO.

> We recently switched to hardware compression because we
> got a new tape changer.  Perhaps that's the cause of the
> problems.

Is it slower in terms of mega(or kilo)bytes/second i/o speeds?

>  These 2 machines were not having problems previously
> when we were doing software compression for everything.
>
>Thank you for your recommendations - I appreciate it.

You're welcome.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
AMD K6-III@500mhz 320M
Athlon1600XP@1400mhz  512M
99.13% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly