On Fri, 02 Sep 2005 09:46:06 -0500 Les Mikesell wrote: > On Fri, 2005-09-02 at 08:29, Carl Wilhelm Soderstrom wrote: > > > > I'm running a machine with 512MB ram and 1GB swap and BackupPC is > > > triggering Linux's OOM (the out of memory killer) and that's making it > > > impossible to backup my main machine. > > > > > > At the moment VSZ for the 2 _dump processes are at 527m and 425m and > > > rsync is at 256m (see below). How can I reduce BackupPC's memory > > > demands??? > > > > try using tar instead of rsync; it has much lower memory requirements. (tho > > it has many other limitations). > > Rsync has to store an in-memory table of all the filenames before it > starts checking them so it can help a bit to split the runs. If you > have several large filesystems, you can do this by adding the > --one-file-system option to the command and explicitly adding > each mount point to the list to back up.
Initially I used tar, but it wasn't able to deal with the number of files on my hard drive. Rsync is able to handle _that_ load. Most of the memory usage is in BackupPC - 527MB for 1 of the BackupPC_dump processes and 425MB for the other. By comparison, rsync is only using 256MB. The reason for 2 BackupPC_dump processes is that the machine in question is being backed up to an external USB hard drive mounted on the same machine. For the curious, the locate command indicates I have 2927627 files using 46 GB of the single partition HD. With that large file count, it's not surprising that BackupPC_dump needs a lot of memory. The big question is whether the memory is being used efficiently. I'd rather not add more ram to the box, but if that's the only way to do backups, then I'll have to do so. ------------------------------------------------------- SF.Net email is Sponsored by the Better Software Conference & EXPO September 19-22, 2005 * San Francisco, CA * Development Lifecycle Practices Agile & Plan-Driven Development * Managing Projects & Teams * Testing & QA Security * Process Improvement & Measurement * http://www.sqe.com/bsce5sf _______________________________________________ BackupPC-users mailing list BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
