Hello All,

I've added more work area to amanda, have been trying to find
what other problems we may be seeing with the job, since it
still seems to take longer than it should.

Upon looking more closely at the amanda report from amdump I see
that the tape I/O rate is around 1800 KP/s where as 2 months ago
15,000 was not unusual.

The reduction does not seem to be tied to a system reboot (patches,
installation of HBA [host bus adapter] for the LTO3) nor any other
event that I can identify, and in fact I notice that we seem to have
two step downs in the I/O rate, separated by aprox one tape cycle.

I have tried to clean the tape drive, have tried to relabel the tape
(amflush running as I write) and will next try a brand new tape with
the assumption that the max number of tape cycles has been reached
on all volumes at the same time. While that would mean remarkable
quality control in manufacture, the tapes where all purchased at the
same time and have been used an almost identical number of times.

If the new tape doesn't help (I expect it will but who knows) I don't
know what else it might be, wear of the tape heads ?

I don't see anything in the /var/adm/messages file (Solaris 9 host)
nor errors on the tape library console, LTO1 is part of a StorEdge L9
library.

I do see the library green light pulse and then go idle for a while.
I don't know if this is typical since the library is down in the 
computer room and we usually run amanda at night. I don't know if the
tape is retrying or we aren't feeding it quickly enough, [note to self,
there must be some I/O metrics I can check]

Any comments or suggestions are welcome.

                                                thank you,

                                                Brian
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   Brian R Cuttler                 brian.cuttler AT wadsworth DOT org
   Computer Systems Support        (v) 518 486-1697
   Wadsworth Center                (f) 518 473-6384
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