11.24 - Improved Backup Performance: Really?

[sebby]

Hello everyone:

Have a new server (2 x Xeon Quad Core 2.0Ghz, 4MB RAM, CentOS 5.x) with about 15 accounts (300MB on average/account). While the daily cpbackup (full) on my secondary drive is pretty fast (about 20 minutes), the load gets very high (snapshot halfway in the process):

Time:                    Wed Jan  7 01:10:39 2009 -0500
1 Min Load Avg:          8.18
5 Min Load Avg:          4.20
15 Min Load Avg:         1.99

Running/Total Processes: 2/202
USER       PID %CPU %MEM    VSZ   RSS TTY      STAT START   TIME COMMAND
root     24791  0.0  0.0   1648   396 ?        SN   01:09   0:00  \_ /usr/local/cpanel/bin/cpuwatch 8.0 /scripts/pkgacct accountName /backup/cpbackup/daily backup
 root     24792  0.1  0.1   8944  7192 ?        SNs  01:09   0:00      \_ pkgacct - accountName - av: 3
 root     24838  1.1  0.0   2476   920 ?        SN   01:09   0:00          \_ /bin/gtar pczf accountName.tar.gz accountName
 root     24839 70.7  0.0   2024   684 ?        DN   01:09   0:41              \_ gzip

Obviously gzip is consuming all the load (this sever is not busy at all, av load during daytime < .5)...

I know this issue was reported/discussed several times before and I thought I’d see some improvement with WHM 11.24...

I have the following questions:

1. Anything I can do to fix this (can the following Tweak setting option impact the load during daily cpbackups ? “The load average above the number of cpus at which logs file processing should be suspended (default 0)”?)?
2. Regarding cpuwatch, I am correct to assume that this is setup automatically to match the total number of cores?So as long as I am below 8 I can relax?

Any suggestion would be most appreciated.

Sebby

[cpanelnick]

Do you have incremental backups enabled?

[hydra]

really hope you have more then 4 MB ram

[sebby]

Do you have incremental backups enabled?

No. Full backups only as I find them much more easier to manage (remote rsync etc...)

really hope you have more then 4 MB ram

make that 4 GB!

Sebby

[cpanelnick]

No. Full backups only as I find them much more easier to manage (remote rsync etc...)


make that 4 GB!

Sebby

If you are not using incremental backups it is having to write new files every since time. The bottleneck is really going to be your cpu and disk i/o. There really isn't much more we can do to optimize this.

You'll see the most improvement with the incremental backups in 11.24. I highly recommend switching to this method. As for your rsycing, I highly recommend upgrading to rsync 3.x if you have not already done so as it deals with lots smaller files better.

[sebby]

Thank you Nick.

Actually I have a daily cron job that is rotating (after remote rsync) my cpbackup/daily to cpbackup/dayOfWeek in order to keep a 7 day set of backups on my backup drive... I never used cpanel incremental backups. How are they structured (first run + increments) as I did not find any documentation on this?

Thank you for your assistance.

seb