Moved catalog -> severe performance decrease

[Mexiken]

Dear Forum,

I have been using Backup Exec for Windows Servers happily for about 11 months.  All was fine and dandy until my system partition filled up (Dell partitioned my drive to their 12 GB default... thanks...).  My Backup Exec catalog was roughly 1GB so I moved this to my "D drive", told Backup Exec the new location, and restarted my services.

Since then my backup jobs have observed drastically decreased performance on the order of one magnitude.  Below I will list all relavent details that I can recall.

Here is a small sample of backup jobs and their times.  The first pair is the typical backup job.  The second pair is what I have been seeing lately.

Job name                  Byte count      Job rate
DELLNAS (weekly)   327 GB           3,100 MB / min
mail server (weekly)  32 GB             1,600 MB / min

DELLNAS (weekly)   335 GB           133 MB / min
mail server (weekly)  33 GB             133 MB / min


System configuration:
Dell PowerEdge 2900
Windows Storage Server 2003 R2 x64
Domain controller - Active Directory
Backup Exec 11d - SP2, HF27
RAID-1 - 2x 73 GB SAS 15K - C:(12 GB system partition), E: (56 GB empty partition)
RAID-5 - 6x 300 GB SAS 10K - D (1.5 TB NAS partition).
4 GB RAM
old catalog path - c:\program files\symantec\backup exec\catalogs\
new catalog path - d:\backup exec catalog\

Notes: I have not yet restarted this server.  I also cannot update through LU anymore.  The tape drive is an IBM Ultrium-TD3 packaged as a Dell PowerVault 110T.  It has a direct connection to DELLNAS.  Both DELLNAS and "mail server" has a gigabit connection to our network.

Thanks in advance!

Kenneth Kollin


Message Edited by Mexiken on 11-19-2007 12:53 PM

Message Edited by Mexiken on 11-19-2007 12:53 PM

[Mexiken]

bump

lots of topics in the last 24 hours!

[DY]

We had the exact same problem (filled up the 12GB partition), but after switching to the D drive there haven't been any real performance issues.  Actually, I'm not even sure how the catalogs could relate to performance.

I guess I'd suggest a reboot, though the services restart should suffice.

[Mexiken]

I'd love to reboot the system... Maybe I'll try this over Thanksgiving break.

I will see if anything improves tonight because I was finally able to use LiveUpdate!  It always failed if I accessed it through Help -> About -> Installed updates -> Run LiveUpdate.  I read that some people had more success running LU by clicking on the link under the Tools menu.

I wouldn't think moving the catalog would affect performance at all except that this was the last change I have made to my system.  It is more likely the problem occurred prior to that and didn't surface until I restarted the services.

Come to think of it, my weekend backups all failed because Backup Exec was looking for the wrong media set.  How this got reset to the default I will never know...

Thank you for your input.

- Ken

[DY]

One other thing, if you're having problems with LiveUpdate, are you performing the update on the console or through remote desktop?  I struggled with LiveUpdate problems not working, like they would download but not install, and it was resolved by simply logging onto the console.

[Mexiken]

I restarted the server last night and it seems like my speed issues are solved!

As for LiveUpdate, I was having problems both remotely and locally.  LU failed when I ran it from the Help menu but worked when I ran it from the Tools menu!

Thanks for your help :)