Hi Stuart
Thanks for all of the details you supplied about your environment, but you
forgot to mention your output devices. I'm ASSuming that this Solaris
system is a NetWorker client, which sends its data stream over a 100 Mb
Ethernet LAN to a storage node, which writes the data to an output device.
Please tell is more about that end of things.
You mentioned doing a 100 MB tar test. If you backup the same 100 MB
directory with both tar and NetWorker, what performance do you see?
Another possibly useful test would be to use NetWorker to backup a
subdirectory far down in the 522 GB partition. If the performance there is
acceptable, walk back up the tree until things get weird.
Finally, the "Legato NetWorker Power Edition Performance Tuning Guide"
(http://web1.legato.com/infodev/publications/NetWorker/perftun/5.5.1/cd_docs
/perftune.pdf) (while somewhat long in the tooth) does have some good ideas
for tests that can be run using NetWorker. I'd try (1) writing a data
stream from this client (perhaps using bigasm) through to your output
device, to confirm that this is not a bottleneck and (2) do a read test of
this disk, to confirm that you can pull data off of it.
And, of course, check the system message logs on both backup client and
storage node during the backup, and check the NetWorker logs on the backup
server.
Please let us know.
Thanks!
tl
Terry Lemons
CLARiiON Application Integration Engineering
EMC²
where information lives
4400 Computer Drive, MS D239
Westboro MA 01580
Phone: 508 898 7312
Email: Lemons_Terry AT emc DOT com
-----Original Message-----
From: Stuart Lamble [mailto:Stuart.Lamble AT ITS.MONASH.EDU DOT AU]
Sent: Tuesday, August 27, 2002 1:37 AM
To: NETWORKER AT LISTMAIL.TEMPLE DOT EDU
Subject: [Networker] Large filesystem backup takes ages.
Hey ho.
We have a Sun Ultra 10 hooked up to a fibre channel hardware RAID
controller, with a 522 GB RAID 5 partition. This partition is
currently holding 39.4 GB of data, in 2,410,991 files. (so about
17 kB per file on average.) UFS filesystem, with filesystem logging
turned on (we really, really, _really_ don't want to be fscking
over 500 GB of data when the filesystem is full and the system goes
down!)
For some reason, Networker is taking an exorbitantly long amount of
time to backup this filesystem. I've seen it sitting idle for
extended periods of time (on a full backup), and when it finally
does start doing things, it'll be at tens or hundreds of kilobytes
per second. This on a system which can quite happily transfer a
100 MB file over ssh in 30 seconds or so (so no, it isn't a duplex
issue. The network connection is a 100 Mbps full duplex Ethernet.)
Tarring up a 100 MB directory tree is also reasonably fast --
certainly faster than Networker seems to be in backing up that amount
of data. I have seen Networker manage peak transfer rates of around
3 MB/s, but that is rarely sustained for more than a few minutes, if
that.
There are things that I can do: I could, for example, reconfigure the
RAID set to have a 16 kB "chunk size" (instead of its current 128 kB),
but I'm not certain if that will have the desired effect, especially
given that tar seems to be reasonably fast. This backup is taking ages
as it is; once the filesystem grows in usage, I can only see things
getting worse.
Networker 6.1.2 on both the server and the client. The server's on an
ATM hookup, and other clients don't exhibit this problem in any event,
so it doesn't seem to be a network issue. Any hints, pointers, or
suggestions would be very gratefully received.
Thanks,
Stuart.
PS: I would have searched the archives, but they seem to be down at
the moment. Am I simply looking at the wrong place? --
http://listserv.temple.edu/archives/networker.html, but that goes to
May 2002 (from March 2000) and the files appear to be not there
("error 2" -- ENOENT -- is a pretty clear indication that the file
the cgi script is trying to open isn't there...) Cheers.
--
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