On Sunday 05 February 2006 10:53, Ian Turner wrote:
>On Sunday 05 February 2006 10:40 am, Stefan G. Weichinger wrote:
>> AFAIK I recommended to use separate disks for vtapes and
>> holdingdisk.
>
>Why even use a holding disk at all with vtapes? It's not like you're
> going to keep the hard disk streaming.

In order to allow better scheduling and somewhat reduced fragmentation 
of the vtapes disk over time.  If it can stuff it all onto the holding 
area which amanda will do if its of sufficient size and allowed, then 
the following copy does it all on one stream, and in sequential order, 
up cable0 and down cable1 in my case.

Without the holding area, its possible amanda could be hammering several 
files at once to the vtape drive, thrashing its seeking mechanism 
excessively.  Or it might even revert to one dump at a time as it would 
when going direct to tape with no holding disk, and that would be 
noticeably slow.  I'm probably lucky as I put the holding disk 
directory on /, and / usually has well over 25GB free here.  I don't 
think its ever used more than 5GB of it though.

FWIW, the holding disk area will get badly fragmented, but thats all 
cleaned up when the run is finished successfully so its not a long term 
problem at all.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
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