Mike, I had a problem with my AIX boxes running AIX 5.2, the network
started very fast and then dropped to the speeds you are talking about.
When I applied service pack 1 (whatever the AIX name for service packs is)
the problem was solved. That's a move from oslevel 5200-00 to 5200-01.

I asked Veritas to write up a tech note about it, but maybe they never got
around to it.

Kyle



|---------+--------------------------------------->
|         |           "Mike Day" <MDay AT qrs DOT com>   |
|         |           Sent by:                    |
|         |           veritas-bu-admin AT mailman DOT eng|
|         |           .auburn.edu                 |
|         |                                       |
|         |                                       |
|         |           29/03/2004 12:42 PM         |
|         |                                       |
|---------+--------------------------------------->
  
>-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|
  |                                                                             
                              |
  |       To:       "'veritas-bu AT mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu'" <veritas-bu AT 
mailman.eng.auburn DOT edu>                 |
  |       cc:                                                                   
                              |
  |       Subject:  [Veritas-bu] Many Aix Backups are slow                      
                              |
  
>-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------|




I've got a tricky problem here.  I backup about 300 servers - 250 Windows
and about 50 UNIX/AIX/Linux onto 1 - 6 LTO tape drive library (StorageTek
L180).  All the AIX boxes are primo ... IBM p630's, p650's and p670's.
Only the p670s have multiple LPARs running but each has at least 1
processor, 1-2 gig ram and a gigabyte NIC card assigned.  We've just
introduced the AIX boxes into the backup environment and the new Netbackup
Media server is a LPAR on the p670 also.  Needless to say many of these
servers' backup speeds are screaming (10,000 to 23,000 kb per sec) ... but
about 7 of the AIX clients have speeds of less than 500 kb per second (all
stats are from folder backups of more than 1 gig).





The only buffer's fine tuning I have setup are on the master server;
NUMBER_DATA_BUFFERS file in my /usr/openv/netbackup folder that is set to
256 and a NET_BUFFER_SZ file that is set to 65536.  Should I have any
similar files on the clients?





The network engineer has run FTP tests, compared the NIC/Switch settings
with the better performers and has not noticed any differences and the get
and put tests are fine.





Does anyone have some suggestions as to what I can do to increase the
backup performance on these boxes?





Thanks for your help,


Mike Day


mday AT qrs DOT com