Forum Discussion

Seth_E's avatar
Seth_E
Level 6
11 years ago

Millions of Files - Slow Performance

Hi there,   We are currently running Netbacku 7.6.0.1 with one media / master server (30 clients only for now) File servers with 1+ million files take forever to backup with a throughput of ...
7.6
Backup and Recovery
NetBackup
Windows Server (2003-2008)
  • Nicolai's avatar
    Nicolai
    11 years ago

    This is a know dilemma for systems with many small files. Time used for opening,reading and closing many files simply take a long time when repeated enough times.

    The best weapon is Netbackup deduplication (MSDP) and Accelerator. 

    The license for 7.6 should include using MSDP as far as I can recall - but I may be wrong.

    Abduls Blog about accelerator:

    https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/blogs/frequently-asked-questions-netbackup-accelerator

    https://www-secure.symantec.com/connect/blogs/frequently-asked-questions-netbackup-accelerator-part-ii

Haniwa's avatar
Haniwa
Level 4
11 years ago

When faced with a similar problem, we used a low-tech solution of chopping the single drive letter (D:\) into 4 different policies, multi-streamed, with backup selections and exclusions to make each policy unique. That, combined with 10Gbit ethernet upgrade on Media Server and Client (we already had MSDP), was able to reduce the Full backup elapsed time from "intolerable" to "tolerable". The result is a weekly Full that previously ran into Monday afternoon, now finished early Sunday AM.

While researching the issue, I also considered disabling 8-dot-three naming on the NTFS filesystem to improve file open time, but disabling 8-dot-three would required a conversion process that management was not willing to undertake.