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Stephen Vaughan wrote:
> okay network is one I left out, but I don't find that to be a problem.
> It rarely goes above 30mbit. Our setup is a single box w/ Xeon dual core
> 2.4ghz x 2, 2x300gig 10k scsi (raid 1) drives and 4gig memory, Debian
> 5.0, gigabit ethernet.
>
> We struggle to backup 4 servers each night, 453gigs / 7,807,318 files.
> Backup window is 9pm to 9am, and we just fit inside that each night. We
> do incrementals 6 nights a week and 1 full per week.
>
> I'm thinking of upgrading the box to raid5 array with 15k scsi drives,
> more memory and a quad core cpu. It's difficult to know what is enough
> though..
Given that you have a current system, you should monitor the various
characteristics and once you have the information you will be able to
clearly decide what/where to spend money on upgrades. Of course, if you
upgrade *everything* then you will probably improve things...
Upgrading RAM will improve the space for cache, depending on the number
of files, and backup method (rsync/rsyncd) might help with that also.
Upgrading disk storage to faster drives, more spindles, etc, will assist
with IO, perhaps a better quality RAID card with cache should also
improve write speeds...
Upgrading the CPU from dual core to quad core, with the same cache/clock
speed/etc, will improve performance if you are doing compression,
calculating checksums, etc.....
Of course, you can spend a million dollars on upgrading the backup
server, only to find that it still isn't any faster, because the disk IO
on the client is maxed out, or the client is swapping to disk, etc...
So, I really would suggest doing some careful measuring before you
decide what to do next.
One thing that can very broadly help determine if the bottleneck is the
client or the backup server is to do one backup at a time. If this runs
at the same speed as doing 4 at a time, then the bottleneck is on the
client.
Also, I found that limiting my under-spec backup server to 2 con-current
backups at a time actually improved the performance, and allowed backups
to complete faster compared to doing 4 at a time.
Finally, unless a large amount of data is likely to be common between
your four clients, it may be easier/simpler/etc to just split the load,
have two backup servers, and each backup server backs up two clients.
Perhaps others could comment on good ways to determine where a
bottleneck is?
Certainly checking to see how much swap space is used during the backups
is a simple method to suggest you need more RAM.
I assume there are values from vmstat which could indicate CPU is
running out of grunt as well - what numbers are best to look at from here?
Finally, for IO, I think vmstat will show blocks in/out from disk, but I
don't think that is the best method. I think there is a tool iostat but
have never used it...
Hope you get more than 0.02c from all that, because it took me longer to
type it up :)
Regards,
Adam
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