Backup Exec 10 is way slower than ver 9

[Jason_Noble]

Backup Exec 9.x use to finish a full backup in 17 hours. Now that same backup takes over 60 hours. I've searched the forums, nothing seems to help.
This is a backup-to-disk job, over a full-duplex gigabit network, the source is a MS Cluster (which never slowed Backup Exec 9). Yes I have all the current patches.

[steve_burkett]

It's not waiting for you to respond to an Alert dialog is it? Check your alerts tab.

When I first upgraded to v10, it started asking for confirmation of tape removal right at the end of the job, and just needed someone to hit the 'OK' button for it to finish. Easily solved by setting up an auto-response to alerts in the configuration. Obviously you won't be getting an alert to remove your tape as you're backing up to disk, but you may have something else popping up.

[Jason_Noble]

Nope, no Alert dialogs. It is running, just very slow. If I open a throughput monitor on the network interface, I'm averaging 6mbit/s transfer rate. That's just not right. If I manually copy a file from the source to the destination I get about 200mbit/s (much faster but still seems slow for gigabit, I cant believe SMB has that much overhead).

[david_chaika_2]

Check out the thread about D2D file fragmentation, which may be the cause of the slowdown. If you find your bkf files are broken into 5000 pieces, you might try deleting all bkf files before a job but leave the two cfg files (I can do that since the disk files are sent to tape), or try running defrag.

Have you looked in the Event logs for clues?

[Jason_Noble]

Drive fragmentation is very low usually less than 1% (I have Executive Software's Diskeeper Enterprise to keep this in check). Also nothing bad in the event manager.
I even have the antivirus service stopped during the backup job.
I've been fighting this for 2 months now, I finally broke down and started posting here.

[priya_khire]

Hello,

Are the backups slow sionce the upgrade to backup exec 10.0? What are you backing up in this job? You have mentioned that the backup to disk jobs are slow. Are the tape backups too slow?

Check the folowing technote:

What Backup Exec settings can be modified to reduce the amount of time it takes for a backup to run?
http://support.veritas.com/docs/249090

Ensure that you have installed the latest release of Backup exec 10.0 5520. If not, install it from the following link:

VERITAS Backup Exec (tm) 10.0 rev. 5520 for Windows Servers Installation Files
http://support.veritas.com/docs/277181

Also install the latest device drivers:

http://support.veritas.com/docs/278408

If the issue persists, revert with details.

Note : If we do not receive your reply within two business days, this post would be marked ‘assumed answered’ and would be moved to ‘answered questions’ pool.

Regards.

[Jason_Noble]

I initially upgraded to 10.0. Then thinking the upgrade was the problem, I'm am now on a clean install of 10.0.
I have the newest version with all the current hot fixes, and the newest device driver install.
I am using the Advanced Open File Option (VSP).
I have antivirus services turned off during the backup job.
The source volume was defragmented before the job ran.

The server is running Windows Server 2003, on Supermicro dual 2.6Ghz Xeon, 2GB ram, full-duplex gigabit ethernet.
I am backing up to a Promise VTrak 8110, I do not have a Tape drive to test at this moment.

The data I am backing up is coming from a 2 node Windows Enterprise Server 2003 Cluster, connected to a fiberchannel Adaptec 2Gb SANbloc RAID. (same machine specs as above, except the nodes' network connections are Static Link Aggregation 1gigabit forming a 2 gigabit line).

The total data volume is around 800GB in about 2 million files.

My current backup job is at 444GB 68Hours and still going.

I can manually copy data (drag-n-drop) from the source volume to the backup destination volume at 200mbit/s, so I don't think its a network or hardware performance problem.

I do have an Extended Support contract should I just use the phone support?

[Warren_Davis]

I have noticed same thing with version 10 and b2d. Verify speed is especially slow. It runs at 60-80 meg/hour and used to be near 1000 meg/hour with my hardware, software and version 9.

I have been through all the things in the note with fragmentation, antivirus, ect. I have a GB network also.
I was able to speed up the backup rate by excluding the backup files in the antiviurs autoprotect but this did not help verify. DAT drive backup is now twice as fast as b2d with same hardware and network. Service pack 1 for win2003 may have slowed down version 10 even more but I dont have any records to back this up.

I bet that something will be found with b2d.

[Jason_Noble]

The simple solution here is to uninstall v10, and reinstall v9. v10 should be listed as a bata if you ask me!
Wonder if my reseller will refund our money now.

[Ross_Smith_2]

I had a similar problem - there may be a thread somewhere here about slow performance on a NAS box...

Basically though our NAS box had a data drive as software RAID 5 and a system drive with raid 0, I found that backups to the system drive were far faster than to the RAID drive. In the end I disabled RAID-5 on the NAS box and reconfigured it as a stripe set. The difference in performance was phenominal. Of course Veritas blamed the NAS box, but it was perfectly fine copying files from any other source...

I'd suggest creating a new B2D target on any server with a basic disk and see if your performance is better.

I'm beginning to wonder whether this is related to the fragmentation problem - I think Veritas pushes the data as a stream of lots of little chunks. BackupExec certainly kills software RAID 5. I haven't tested hardware RAID yet, but will be buying a new server shortly...

Ross

[Ross_Smith_2]

Ok, this may be just me having another dig at veritas, but if you're suffering with slow performance you might want to check my thread about Winzip - it's something like 3x faster than Veritas.

makes you think doesn't it....

Ross