cpbackup bogs down server

[ANewDay]

Gosh, it takes up so much resources that even browsing my forums isn't possible There were only a few files changed on the server. I don't understand why it's taking so long, almost 30 minutes to update 50mb of changed files. Can't you guys rewrite it to use lesss resources like rsync? It's really frustrating to have it bog down the server like that!

[ujr]

Cpanel, usually runs fairly smoothly. I bet you've got other things running that are making your box crawl. As an admin, first place to look is top. Do some digging.

[chirpy]

Backup performance is directly related to your hardware and has nothing to do with cPanel. Most of the resources are used running gzip which is both very CPU and IO intensive. If you don't have the server resources to run compressed backups, try incrementals instead.

[ANewDay]

Cpanel, usually runs fairly smoothly. I bet you've got other things running that are making your box crawl. As an admin, first place to look is top. Do some digging.

No, the server is very idle during the backup process. Nothing else is running that will make the box crawl.

@Chripy: it is set to do incremental backups and not many files have changed on the server. I did notice that iowait shoots up to 60-70% during the process. Centos kernel iowait issue, I suppose

[ujr]

As chirpy mentioned, it is very much related to your hardware. If you disk subsystem is slow, or non-appropriate drivers are being used, this can obviously also bring it to a crawl.

Another thing that comes to mind, is: Does your disk result in IO errors or are there bad sectors... check your disk too, as sometimes it can crawl when a disk is failing or going to fail soon.

[chirpy]

t is set to do incremental backups and not many files have changed on the server. I did notice that iowait shoots up to 60-70% during the process. Centos kernel iowait issue, I suppose

Which kernel are you running, and what type of disks (IDE, SATA,SCSI)?

[soisix]

I am having similar problems and cpbackup is the only thing running at the time the server gets bogged down.

I am running FC5
Pentium 3GHZ Dual Core
2GB Ram
SATA Hard drive

Really could use some help on here as it brings pretty much all servers down

[boatdesign]

Gosh, it takes up so much resources that even browsing my forums isn't possible There were only a few files changed on the server. I don't understand why it's taking so long, almost 30 minutes to update 50mb of changed files. Can't you guys rewrite it to use lesss resources like rsync? It's really frustrating to have it bog down the server like that!

Are you doing the tar.gz backup method or the incremental backup method? The tar.gz packages all files each time. The incremental method in whm/cpanel to a secondary drive does only changed files and is much more resource friendly.

You might want to do incremental frequently, and then less frequently package all that up into a tar.gz for remote secondary backup.

Also if you have an IDE/7200 rpm SATA server it might be time to look at upgrading to a 10k SCSI/SAS server. You'll find that SCSI/SAS based servers are a lot more robust in terms of handling io load without any noticeable slowdown to other activities going on.

[viptexting]

cpbackup monitors load as well, if you've ever run it manually via /scripts/cpbackup you will notice that if the load gets high it will pause for a while then carry on when the load goes down.

If your running a local backup you have to expect it to be a bit intensive on the hard drive at the very least.

We have cpbackup running on all our servers, backup is to a NAS volume, generally the bottleneck in this setup is the speed of the NAS and it can take a few hours at times (we have about 20Gb of data to backup accross several servers), however this isnt a problem as it has no noticable effect on the servers.

[ANewDay]

I use incremental backups, after changing the extracpu setting to 3 in /var/cpanel/cpanel.config it is much faster and doesn't bog down system. cpuwatch was at 2.0 while cpbackup is running.

[hostmedic]

has anyone here used acronis or r1soft ?

[Bailey]

We will be setting up r1soft here shortly and I'd be happy to let you know how it goes.

Data center says they have ~ 20 Linux/cPanel boxes running r1soft now and that it's superb -- so I am looking forward to it, to say the least.

Bailey