On Fri, Jul 25, 2003 at 03:08:48PM +0100, jason.walton AT nomadsoft.co DOT uk 
wrote:
> I ran amstatus every five minutes last night to confirm this, and it shows
> on[e] filesystem dumping while the other is listed as dumping, but sticks at
> 32K until the other one finishes.
> [...]
> Over the previous month, I have moved the backup onto seperate network
> cards, seperate networks, specifed spindles, increased the holding disc
> space, reduced the holding disc space, increased max dumps etc, reduced max
> dumps etc.

As I understand it (though I might well be wrong), all of these things will
affect when Amanda chooses to start a given dump, but will have no effect at
all on how quickly the dump proceeds once started.

There might be resource contention on the client machine (disk, CPU, RAM,
whatever).

> From my observations, the gtar on the remote
> machine is using "listed_incremental" even though I am specifying no
> incrementals to be performed. I don;t know if this is important or not, but
> if I run the command by hand it takes forever to run, if I omit the
> list-incremental option on the command line. gtar flies through. Note that
> this may be a totally seperate issue to the problem I am facing.

Or this might be it.  If listed-incremental is as slow as people claim it to
be, and you're running three of them at once, that could be the problem.  If
those file systems have zillions of tiny files (as opposed to a few large
ones), that'd make the problem worse -- more work for the listed-incremental
processing to do, perhaps its data structures within gtar don't scale to the
level you need, etc., etc.

In short, I suspect that your Amanda configuration is doing what it should,
and that you should focus your attention on the client machine.

--

|  | /\
|-_|/  >   Eric Siegerman, Toronto, Ont.        erics AT telepres DOT com
|  |  /
When I came back around from the dark side, there in front of me would
be the landing area where the crew was, and the Earth, all in the view
of my window. I couldn't help but think that there in front of me was
all of humanity, except me.
        - Michael Collins, Apollo 11 Command Module Pilot