I see this issue all the time.  it happens when you have large numbers of 
inodes or files on a volume.  I recently had an incremental backup run for 
about 25 hours and only back up about 500gig.  It had 2.9 million files in 
it.  In comparison I had another incremental backup of 462gig which only 
took about 5 hours and it had 1900 files.  

All the time is taken up during phase2 of the ndmp process.  the thing that 
really sucks about this is that it ties up a drive for the whole process.  
So it sits there idle for 20 hours, then writes for 5.  

I have asked both emc and netapp about this, and neither really has a good 
answer.  One thing we are going to try and do is try and tune our volumes 
so they are 1 million files and under.. seems easy enough, but as volumes 
grow this can become more complicated.

anybody else have any other ways around this?

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