Issue backing Unix clients

[Vino_J]

Hi All,

Have an unusual issue with two clients while trying to backup. The backup throughput is high close to 40 Mbps and drops to 50 kbps after sometime. If I supspend the baackup streams and resume they are once again running at the maximum speed and gradually decreasing. Deatils of the master Server and clients are as follows:

Master Server :

Netbackup Version : 6.5.6 Enterprise (Windows 2003 enterprise x64 R2)

Clients: Linux and SunOS

[jim_dalton]

run bpbkar on the same data and redirect to dev null. that rules out all of the infrrastructure apart from the reading of the client data. that'll give you a big hint as to where the issue lies.

jim

[Yasuhisa_Ishika]

Are there many small files, or large directory entry? These have negative impact to backup performance. Adding to jim's suggestion, run "find" or "tar"(output should be redirected to /dev/null) to measure filesystem performance degration.

[Vino_J]

checked the bpbkar logs as suggested.. found few failures like 71,227 at times... still backup runs when suspended and resumed and the issue starts again... checked for firewall and found none... any suggestions???

[Marianne]

The suggestion was to run bpbkar locally on the client to /dev/null.

This will test local read speed from disk, excluding any network and/or firewall involvement.

This bpbkar test is described in Planning and Performance Guide  http://www.symantec.com/docs/TECH62317 

To measure disk I/O using bpbkar
1.  Turn on the legacy bpbkar log by ensuring that the bpbkar directory exists.
UNIX
/usr/openv/netbackup/logs/bpbkar

2.  Set logging level to 1.

3.  Enter the following:
UNIX
/usr/openv/netbackup/bin/bpbkar -nocont -dt 0 -nofileinfo -nokeepalives file_system > /dev/null

Where file_system is the path being backed up.

4.  Check how long it took NetBackup to move the data from the client disk:
UNIX: The start time is the first PrintFile entry in the bpbkar log. The end
time is the entry "Client completed sending data for backup." The amount of
data is given in the entry "Total Size."