Bacula-users

Re: [Bacula-users] Bacula causing high disk-io on clients

2015-06-27 09:21:44
Subject: Re: [Bacula-users] Bacula causing high disk-io on clients
From: Alan Brown <ajb2 AT mssl.ucl.ac DOT uk>
To: Dmitri Maziuk <dmaziuk AT bmrb.wisc DOT edu>, bacula-users AT lists.sourceforge DOT net
Date: Sat, 27 Jun 2015 14:19:29 +0100
On 27/06/15 10:45, Dmitri Maziuk wrote:
Compressing data on the client means fewer bytes to send over the wire. Block-level compression like bzip2 tends to be completely cpu-bound and anything bigger than a cellphone tends to have plenty of cycles to spare.

Not entirely true and certainly not accurate for Gb/s and faster links.

Individual CPU cores haven't changed much in terms of speed for nearly a decade and most compression algorithms are single threaded when fed from stdin (even pigz and pbzip). On top of that you're facing memory <-> CPU bottlenecks.

The result when running gzip compression over a 1Gb/s link is that you'll usually achieve a maximum end-to-end rate of 30MB/s, vs the wire speed of 110MB/s ( b = bit, B=BYTE, aka o = octet if you're french )

bzip is significantly worse. Even LZO gives little gain at 1Gb/s in exchange for making your CPU run hot and drawing more power than you need to.

At 10Gb/s, LZO is a significant bottleneck.


The takeaway: Unless you're backing up over a WAN (and a slow or overloaded one at that), wireside compression is not a net win.

We have 300 people on our campus linking to the main site at 1Gb/s and whilst backing up machines on the main site to our satellite one we still achieve faster backups without compression than with it.


The other side of compression is that it's a huge CPU drain. I already have enough problems with people rebooting windows systems mid-backup without adding even more incentive for them to hit the Big Red Button.

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