Tobias Bartel wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> i am tasked to set up daily full backups of our entire fax communication
> and they are all stored in one single director ;). There are about
> 800.000 files in that directory what makes accessing that directory
> extremely slow. The target device is a LTO3 tape drive with an 8 slots
> changer.

What's the average file size? I may be that you're simply hitting the 
filesystems performance. Try measuring the speed with tar

time tar cf /dev/null /path/to/files

Alternatively:

tar cf - /path/to/file | pv > /dev/null

pv is a pipe that can measure throughput.

I've tried with some of the filesystems I have .. they can go all the 
way down to 2-5MB/s when there are a huge amount of really small files.

They you get a rough feeling about the time spend "just" by reading the 
files off disk. (if you spool data to disk before tape, then you should 
add in some time for that).

> With my current configuration Bacula needs ~48h to make a complete
> backup which kinda conflicts with the requirement of doing dailys.
> 
> Does anybody have any suggestions on how i could speed things up? 

Try to find out "where" the bottleneck is in your system. It may be the 
catalog that's too slow, it may be that you should disable spooling.

> PS: I already talked to my boss and our developers and they will change
> the system so the faxes get stored in subdirectories. But changing that
> doesn't have a very high priority and got scheduled for next summer.

Based on above investigations it may be that they should do it sooner 
rather than later.

Also read the thread about the "Large Maildir", thats basically the same
issues.

-- 
Jesper

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