On Jan 31, 2012, at 4:25 PM, Kimball Larsen wrote: > We are a small office (6 employees) with a mixture of windows and mac > machines sitting on desks. I have set up a server (Ubuntu linux) that has > been happily running backuppc for several years handling backups for all the > machines in the office with grace AND style. We love it. > > However, in the last few months some of the users have noticed that when > backuppc is running a backup (incremental or full - does not seem to matter > which) it can have a serious impact to the performance of their local > machine. Stuff comes to a crawl and they are nearly unable to work because > simple things like switching from one application to another starts to take > several seconds, etc. The machine behaves like it is hammering swap space > and thrashing for memory. At least one user reports this goes on for several > hours (and I confirmed that his latest incremental took 119 minutes to > complete). > > All the machines affected in this way are wired to the gigabit network (not > wireless), and I'm using rsync for the transfer method. The users with the > complaints are all using OS X on late model high-end MacBook Pro laptops. > > Is there anything I can to to have the backups run in a more transparent > manner? We are not all that concerned with speed of backup process - we're > all here all day anyway, so as long as everyone gets a backup at least once a > day we're happy. > > I have set up backuppc to only run 1 concurrent backup - should I change this > to a larger number, making the server work harder and hopefully easing up on > my clients a bit? > > Thanks! > > -- Kimball
I just wanted to follow up with a description of what I changed to solve this: First off, the users with performance problems on their machines during backups all had a copy of Parallels (Windows emulation software) that was either running or had been run in the last day. Parallels stores a virtual hard drive in a single file that is quite large - 14GB in one case and nearly 30 in another. These files were being included in the backups, and I suspect are the main culprit of my problem. They are also backed up in Time Machine, so I simply removed them from backuppc as they are less critical than other data. Further, following the suggestions of several of the folks who responded, I made 2 other changes to my RsyncClientCmd: I changed the cipher to use arcfour, (which is a bit less secure, but we don't care because this all happens on our LAN) because it is faster. Secondly, I set the nice level of the rsync command to make it play ... well... nicer. :) Here is my current RsyncClientCmd: $sshPath -q -x -c arcfour -l username $host nice -n 19 $rsyncPath $argList+ A heartfelt thank you to all who chimed in with suggestions. Hopefully someone will find this useful in the future. -- Kimball ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Keep Your Developer Skills Current with LearnDevNow! The most comprehensive online learning library for Microsoft developers is just $99.99! Visual Studio, SharePoint, SQL - plus HTML5, CSS3, MVC3, Metro Style Apps, more. Free future releases when you subscribe now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/learndevnow-d2d _______________________________________________ BackupPC-users mailing list [email protected] List: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/backuppc-users Wiki: http://backuppc.wiki.sourceforge.net Project: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
