Turned out to be simpler than I thought. Our Fast Ethernet card was pegged at half duplex instead of full. Using full duplex allowed the data to stream, and our backup completed in one hour instead of 7.

Maybe I should post a summary of things I've said to myself here :)

On Mon, 24 May 1999, Bennett Todd wrote:

1999-05-24-14:17:29 Benjy Feen:

...

[...] At this point it needs to write an index which ends up being about 76MB. Now the fun begins. The index data isn't streaming at ALL. It writes a couple dozen blocks and then pauses, and as we progress into the tape the pauses get longer and longer. I'm guessing that the tape is continuously rewinding and seeking to the write point, writing a couple of blocks, and then starting over again. The index takes about 4 hours to write this way.

I'm not a netbackup expert, in fact I know very little about it, but if I found a situation like that I'd be looking for a way to write that index file to disk. Or to send it through a pipe, with something like team[1] to aggressively buffer the tape output.

-Bennett

[1] URL:ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/FreeBSD/distfiles/team-3.1.tar.gz

-=- Benjy Feen benjy@feen.com http://www.feen.com Specialization is for insects. =-=