Howdy, I'm seeing what I believe to be unusual behavior with regards to transfer speeds. Ultimately, I'd like to find out if either bacula-fd or bacula-dir determine the maximum possible transfer speed during a backup, and if that speed is locked during the process.
During the past few days, I've been seeing anywhere between 0.5 and 3.5% packet loss during large-packet pings (1450 byte packets), though that isn't the reason for the post. It appears the transfer rate of the backup, in full, is determined in the beginning phases of the director / file-daemon negotiation, though I have not found any documentation to verify this. Unfortunately, the Director Services Daemon documentation in the developer's manual is "to be written." [1] All machines are running 5.0.0. On Tuesday, the backups were running unusually far behind schedule. The particular job that was running was transferring at approximately 2Mb/s. I was able to do some basic testing to see what other transfers would be affected, and found that I could get ~9.6Mb/s between the backup server and the same client. At 9:00AM, I cancelled the job to let some smaller jobs complete, and rescheduled the job afterwards. The rescheduled job ran significantly faster than previously, within a matter of two hours between the jobs. The transfer information from the cancelled job follows: Elapsed time: 1 hour 14 mins 8 secs FD Bytes Written: 1,035,309,129 (1.035 GB) Rate: 232.8 KB/s The transfer information from the rescheduled job, which was later cancelled for further testing, follows: Elapsed time: 13 mins 26 secs FD Bytes Written: 1,260,431,584 (1.260 GB) Rate: 1563.8 KB/s Outside of cancelling the job, I made no other changes between these jobs, and I cannot explain the large difference in rate. As I am unable to find documentation on how the negiotion takes place, my theory is that the slower running jobs are initiated during a time in which the network is experiencing packet loss, and never recovers from that state. Further data I have seen seems to suggest this is the case. The following log snippets are from the same host, on two separate days: Elapsed time: 12 hours 54 mins 16 secs FD Bytes Written: 7,364,615,843 (7.364 GB) Rate: 158.5 KB/s Elapsed time: 10 hours 10 mins 4 secs SD Bytes Written: 51,384,264,311 (51.38 GB) Interestingly, the latter log snippet maintained a transfer rate of 12Mb/s throughout the entire 10 hour period, according to my firewall network graph, stopping only to despool to tape. Does bacula lock in to a particular transfer rate until the backup reaches completion? Thanks, and regards. [1] - http://www.bacula.org/5.0.x-manuals/en/developers/developers/Director_Services_Daemon.html -- Glen Barber ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users