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Fella's, truly, my apologies and ALL THE THANX I CAN MUSTER. Mr.
Holger, you sir, in particular. In my less-than-savvy windoze-based
mind (yes still, and I've been ALL Linux for over a year...), I had
completely forgotten that there are many opportunities for bottlenecks,
and it turned out to be as simple as a few too many 40-wire IDE cables,
connecting my dedicated swap-drive, as well as both my LVM-managed
backup drives...
Yes, I feel like an idiot (in case you were going to be too kind to
ask), and just today, got and replaced the cables, to show a HUGE
improvement in performance (over all, not just on the backups...).
Again, Holger, thank you. It was you who first got me rethinking my
short-sightedness, and brought me to the problem!!
Paul
- -------- Original Message --------
Subject: Re: [BackupPC-users] OK, how about changing the server's
backuppc process niceness?
Date: Tue, 02 Jan 2007 18:01:44 -0600
From: Jason Hughes <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: Holger Parplies <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
CC: Paul Harmor <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
BackupPC-users@lists.sourceforge.net
References: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Holger Parplies wrote:
> Paul Harmor wrote on 01.01.2007 at 20:51:43 [[BackupPC-users] OK, how about
> changing the server's backuppc process niceness?]:
>
>> I have only 2 machines (at the moment) being backed up, but every time
>> the backups start, the server system slows to an UNUSEABLE crawl, until
>> I can, slowly, start top, and renice the 4 backuppc processes.
>>
>> Any way to make them start nicer, to begin with?
>>
[...]
> I wouldn't be surprised, though, if your problem is either not CPU related
> or caused by a misconfiguration if it really is. Please someone correct me
> if I'm wrong, but a 1.3 GHz Duron doesn't sound slow enough by far to me to
> be legitimately overloaded by 2 backups. 512MB of memory maybe, but renicing
> wouldn't help then, would it?
>
> Have you tried what happens, if you only run *one* backup at a time
> ("$Conf{MaxBackups} = 1;")?
>
>
Good recommendations, Holger. I would add that "nice"ing a process only
changes its scheduling affinity, but does not modify in any way its hard
disk activity or DMA priority, so until the original poster understands
what exactly makes the server slow, he's shooting in the dark. A busy
hard drive usually makes a system feel slower than a busy CPU process,
because hard disk activity requires a 6-10ms seek minimum, plus
streaming and unloading to vram, depending on what other processes are
doing.
Personally, I dedicate a Pentium Pro 200mhz with a whopping 128mb of
ram, and it backs up about 130gb across four machines, all starting
about at the same time, using rsyncd on 3 and SMB on 1. It's true the
CGI interface is slow to respond during two simultaneous backups, but
otherwise it's usable. I wouldn't put another app on that machine,
though, for obvious reasons.
IMHO, the original poster would do well to diagnose what bottleneck is
the culprit before attempting to fix it. My suggestions, to help reduce
the CPU usage further, is to drop compression to 0. That should be
about all that BackupPC would spend a lot of time on during a backup.
But my PPro200 can handle level 3 compression; a >1Ghz Duron will too.
JH
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