Suggestions: 1. Try to dump to null as a test. 2. What is your ONTAP release? I believe there have been improvements in dump/restore performance for such environments in more recent releases.
Eyal.
On 9/6/06, Scott T. Mikusko guerilla@sw.xo.com wrote:
I'm running into a recurring issue with backing up my NearStore and a long F760 filer.
In the procoess of backing some large filesystems (qtrees), it appears that NDMP is basically timing out and fails. I'm running Veritas NetBackup 6.0 (finally upgrading from 4.5 recently). I think the issue has to do with NDMP starting the dump commands on the filer, which then does a three-way backup to another filer with local tape drives.
The debug from ndmp logs shows for a manual full backup of a filer:
Sep 05 21:05:57 EDT [ndmpd:58]: Log message: DUMP: creating "/vol/vol0/../snapshot_for_backup.370" snapshot. Sep 05 21:06:05 EDT [ndmpd:58]: Log message: DUMP: Using Partial Volume Dump with Exclude Lists Sep 05 21:07:31 EDT [ndmpd:58]: Log message: DUMP: Date of this level 1 dump: Tue Sep 5 21:05:57 2006. Sep 05 21:07:31 EDT [ndmpd:58]: Log message: DUMP: Date of last level 0 dump: Fri Aug 18 19:20:57 2006. Sep 05 21:07:31 EDT [ndmpd:58]: Log message: DUMP: Dumping /vol/vol0/files3.rt to NDMP connection Sep 05 21:07:31 EDT [ndmpd:58]: Log message: DUMP: mapping (Pass I)[regular files]
It never completes the mapping of the files in Pass I. It just sits there. The filesystems I'm backing up are between 250-650GB with a LOT of small files (millions) and many subdirs. Tons of mail and html files.
My guess is that the amount of files and dirs are getting large that NDMP can't map them fully and is timing out after 8 hours. It shouldn't take that long to map files for the size of data it's doing; I've seem mapping times be much less for larger sets of data.
I know that the filesystem topology can cause NDMP backups to be slow, depending on file sizes, data layout, filer load, network etc, but this is happening on moderately busy filers or bone idle NearStores.
Anyone run across lengthy DUMP times?
Chewing through NOW and Veritas support site hasn't turned up anything obvious.
Just curious if others have run into NDMP/dump issues like this.
-Scott