Slow Backups
Hello,
Three days ago my overnight backups started taking over twice as long to complete. I am running WHM 54, CENTOS 6.7. I have the legacy backups disabled. My Backup configuration is Compressed and the backups are being stored on a network attached storage array. I am not seeing any major server loads or memory usage overnight. When I view the active processes I do see that two pkgacct scripts are running. One is running using the root account the second is using the account that is being backed up. I am wondering if this is normal?
I was also wondering if anyone has any suggestions on what else I can look at or do to resolve the slow backup issue.
Thanks!
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Hello :) Do you have free space on the local drive to test a backup generation? This will help confirm if the network storage device is the culprit. Thank you. 0 -
Good idea, that would remove the NAS and the network from the equation. I am going to first try a reboot of the server this evening. If that doesn't help I do have enough space for a single full backup. Thanks for the suggestion. 0 -
Over the last couple of weeks I have been trying different configuration changes with my backups, trying to get them to complete in a reasonable time like they did a month ago. I tried backing up to the server's hard drive vs the external Network RAID. This improved backups slightly. Looking over the backup logs I see that 80-90% of the time used is for creating the TAR file. I have tried disabling compression. This resulted in little to no improvement. I cleaned out a few GBs worth of files from the accounts, still no improvement. I changed the ionice priority in the tweak settings. If anything, backup times have gotten worse. I am now wondering if this is a priority issue. I see that the latest backup script is set to use nice, which in turn is setting the priority of the backups to the lowest setting (19). As my backups run early in the morning I would like them to have the highest priority. I would much rather my backups slow down some search engine from half way around the world than delay my backups so much they impact users I am most concerned with. I am thinking of editing the backup script and changing nice(18) to nice(1) or nice(0), simply to see if I can get my backups to complete before business hours. Can anyone tell me if this is a bad idea? Is there a better way to have my backups get the highest priority? Thanks! 0 -
How much data are you backing up? Obviously the more data you're backing up the longer it'll take. Files that don't change often, you might exclude from backups to help speed things a bit: How to Exclude Files From Backups - cPanel Knowledge Base - cPanel Documentation 0 -
Hi InfoPro. Thanks for the response. I am backing up about 25GB of data. I have reduced this by about 20% over the last couple of weeks. So even though the amount of data I am backing up is less than a month ago my backups are taking 50-200% LONGER to complete. I have eliminated things like network, storage array, compression, increased storage needs. Based on what I have read in the cPanel forum, it looks like the cPanel developers at some point modified the backup script and implemented nice and cpuwatch so that the backups would not impact other processes. My theory is that the backup script is now, such a low process that overall backup time frame is now a function of how busy my server is over night. This is why I was looking to see if anyone knew if there would be any major impact if I change the nice setting in the backup script. I will test a nice(1) setting on the next backup and report back in case anyone else is experiencing this same issue. If that doesn't resolve my problem I am going to install a third party backup program which can do incremental backups with recovery from any incremental backup made during the week (something the cPanel solution can not do). 0 -
overall backup time frame is now a function of how busy my server is over night.
Assuming you're aware of the reasons for a busy server, nightly, have you considered changing the time backups run each night?0 -
If your server has high load for any reason then backup process will be halted until load goes down and then start it again. Some resources intensive sites can overload server and cause delay for the backups. I would suggest you to monitor your server during backup and find out the resources intensive processes/accounts. Secondly if the host server and backup server are on different networks then it can also affect on network speed and communication. 0
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