On Jan 31, 2012, at 4:25 PM, Kimball Larsen wrote:
> We are a small office (6 employees) with a mixture of windows and mac
> machines sitting on desks. I have set up a server (Ubuntu linux) that has
> been happily running backuppc for several years handling backups for all the
> machines in the office with grace AND style. We love it.
>
> However, in the last few months some of the users have noticed that when
> backuppc is running a backup (incremental or full - does not seem to matter
> which) it can have a serious impact to the performance of their local
> machine. Stuff comes to a crawl and they are nearly unable to work because
> simple things like switching from one application to another starts to take
> several seconds, etc. The machine behaves like it is hammering swap space
> and thrashing for memory. At least one user reports this goes on for several
> hours (and I confirmed that his latest incremental took 119 minutes to
> complete).
>
> All the machines affected in this way are wired to the gigabit network (not
> wireless), and I'm using rsync for the transfer method. The users with the
> complaints are all using OS X on late model high-end MacBook Pro laptops.
>
> Is there anything I can to to have the backups run in a more transparent
> manner? We are not all that concerned with speed of backup process - we're
> all here all day anyway, so as long as everyone gets a backup at least once a
> day we're happy.
>
> I have set up backuppc to only run 1 concurrent backup - should I change this
> to a larger number, making the server work harder and hopefully easing up on
> my clients a bit?
>
> Thanks!
>
> -- Kimball
I just wanted to follow up with a description of what I changed to solve this:
First off, the users with performance problems on their machines during backups
all had a copy of Parallels (Windows emulation software) that was either
running or had been run in the last day. Parallels stores a virtual hard drive
in a single file that is quite large - 14GB in one case and nearly 30 in
another. These files were being included in the backups, and I suspect are the
main culprit of my problem.
They are also backed up in Time Machine, so I simply removed them from backuppc
as they are less critical than other data.
Further, following the suggestions of several of the folks who responded, I
made 2 other changes to my RsyncClientCmd:
I changed the cipher to use arcfour, (which is a bit less secure, but we don't
care because this all happens on our LAN) because it is faster.
Secondly, I set the nice level of the rsync command to make it play ... well...
nicer. :)
Here is my current RsyncClientCmd:
$sshPath -q -x -c arcfour -l username $host nice -n 19 $rsyncPath $argList+
A heartfelt thank you to all who chimed in with suggestions.
Hopefully someone will find this useful in the future.
-- Kimball
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