Well,  I may have "lied" a bit when saying that nothing had changed...

What did change was that I moved the server from temporarily sitting on the
floor to where it will now stay full-time.  So it was a shutdown, unplug the
external tape drive and other devices, and then plug them all back in. 
Also, one of the little screws which connects the SCSI cable to the back of
the server has long ago broken off and gone missing.  So it's only attached
by one screw.

Well, do you agree with me that it is still backing up the same amount of
data and all the DLEs?  It certainly looks that way from the mail reports. 
I'm a bit worried because it's looking "too good to be true".

I also don't see how it can dump 130-odd gigabytes of data within a bit more
than 3 hours??

Thanks for your help on this.


Jon LaBadie wrote:
> 
> On Thu, Aug 03, 2006 at 02:46:06AM -0700, Joe Donner (sent by Nabble.com)
> wrote:
>> 
>> That was definitely not the case.  The holding disk has been empty all
>> this
>> time, except on 31 July.  And after I ran amflush it was empty again.
>> 
>> What I don't understand is the increase in dump time and tape time?  They
>> both more than doubled in speed!  How is that possible?
>> 
>> 
>> Olivier Nicole wrote:
>> > 
>> >> I honestly haven't changed anything.  The only thing that happened was
>> >> that
>> >> I had to run amflush on July 31, because for some reason the
>> >> amanda-related
>> >> services on the backup server seemed to have hung (but that's an
>> entirely
>> >> different issue).
>> > 
>> > That si just a wilkd guess, but how about the amflush has freed space
>> > on your holding disk that had been wasted for ages?
>> > 
> 
> Holding disk issues were going to be my guess also.
> 
> When the run time (wall clock) and tape time (taper
> is active) match as the first two:
> 
> Run Time (hrs:min)         9:43
> Dump Time (hrs:min)        6:21
> Tape Time (hrs:min)        9:23
> 
> Run Time (hrs:min)         9:43
> Dump Time (hrs:min)        6:17
> Tape Time (hrs:min)        9:23
> 
> it "generally" means your dumps are going straight to tape.
> Contrast that with the last two where time for taping the
> same amount of data is greatly lower than total run time.
> 
> Run Time (hrs:min)         4:03
> Dump Time (hrs:min)        3:12
> Tape Time (hrs:min)        1:17
> 
> Run Time (hrs:min)         4:27
> Dump Time (hrs:min)        3:37
> Tape Time (hrs:min)        1:16
> 
> However, if the dumps were going straight to tape then I
> would expect the dump time (cumulative time for dumping of
> each DLE - thus can be > run time if DLEs dump in parallel)
> to match tape time.
> 
> So it would appear the dumps were going to the holding disk
> but were severely constrained by slow tapeing.  I wonder
> about the halving of dump time also.  There may still have
> been a problem with the disk system.
> 
> Did anyone change any scsi cables or terminators.
> Or maybe the just "jiggled" things back there doing other work?
> 
> 
> -- 
> Jon H. LaBadie                  jon AT jgcomp DOT com
>  JG Computing
>  4455 Province Line Road        (609) 252-0159
>  Princeton, NJ  08540-4322      (609) 683-7220 (fax)
> 
> 

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