> Depending on how comfortable you are building your own packages,
> Fedora has 3.2.1 almost ready to go. We had to package two perl
> modules for the added FTP support.
>
> If you are willing to try them but don't want to build yourself I
> could probably build them for you.
>
> Thanks,
> Richard
Sure, I'll try NetBackup 3.2.1. I have not build packages before myself, 
although I wouldn't mind first using Fedora to see if the performance will 
actually be good for me.

> What is the CPU utilization during the BackupPC backup?  What is the 
> network utilization?  What is the disk utilization?  Is the machine 
> swapping?  Is it doing something else?
The CPU utilization used to be very high until I disabled gzip compression last 
week. This did not affect performance, just processor usage. The machine is not 
swapping and has free memory even. The server i
s a clean CentOS install with minimal packages installed, although on Debian 
the server did not perform better. I have installed packages via 1) EPEL and 2) 
Debian repository.

During back-ups the load often goes up to an average of 2 or 3, cpu-utilisation 
is still somewhat high, although much lower than before disabling gzip 
compression.

> Start with "vmstat 1" on the BackupPC box and watch it.  See what the 
> usage pattern looks like.  Try to find out what is limiting your 
> performance.
I will read into vmstat to see how it can help me see if the problem is 
IO-related or what it's related to. Thanks for the tip.

> We've been trying to tell you that you're seeing abnormal performance.  I 
> get much better performance with a single 1.5GHz VIA processor, 512MB RAM 
> and a single SATA spindle.  Something is wrong here.  We are not going to 
> be able to tell you what:  you will have to dig a little deeper and see 
> what your machine is doing during a backup.
Yes, I seem to be poor at troubleshooting bad performance with BackupPC.

> Lots of tiny files, especially combined with a shortage of RAM (rsync 
> transfers 
> the entire directory listing and holds it in memory before starting the 
> transfer).
> 
> Huge sparse files (but not many other things handle them well either).
> 
> Running in a VM.  Worst case is probably a VM with an LVM on a virtual disk 
> with  sparse allocation (growing as needed).
> 
> Anything else with activity on the same physical disk competing for head 
> position.
The server has enough RAM for sure. There are a lot of tiny files, but only 
because BackupPC is said to back-up all files/directories starting from /. A 
fresh CentOS/Debian install seems to have already 30.000 files. The most 
crowded server has 200.000 files. 

Thanks for all your replies. I am purchasing 2 new servers next month and I am 
planning to install Backup 3.2.1 on one of these and benchmark backing up a 
fresh Linux install.

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