Performance testing w BackupExec, comments requested.

[Jeremy Allison]

On Tue, Jan 24, 2006 at 10:26:30PM +1100, Star King of the Grape Trees wrote:
> Renamed the topic because I wanted to have some followup, and I believe 
> that most are ignoring this message because of the subject line (I 
> thought it was yet more spam)
> 
> Lawrence Walton wrote:
> 
> >Hi everyone!
> >
> >Don't worry this is good.
> >
> >This is a quick note about some informal performance testing I've been
> >doing with BackupExec 10, using 2003 server, xp, and samba in the role of
> >back-up-to-disk server. backing up a Exchange with about 125 gigs of data.
> >
> >Using XP workstation and 2003 server as the first target I was getting
> >between 500 and 750 megs a minute.
> >
> >Samba as a target on a much inferior hardware then the XP and 2003
> >server was averaging 900 to 1000 megs a minute.
> >
> >So far so good.
> >
> >Samba on a very nice Opteron raid system.... stock 2.6.15. Just a little
> >more on the top end, 1350, and seeming never below 1000, satifactory but
> >worth tweeking.
> >
> >I thought it slightly odd the Opteron was not working hard at all.
> >
> >No load in top, no waiting tasks in vmstat.
> >
> >Now I'm a kernel junky at heart and had read quite a bit about the io
> >schedulers and thought it wise to change the scheduler to cfq.
> >
> >This improved the peeks and valleys, now it was consistently over 1100,
> >but nothing more on the top end.
> >
> >Then I turned on sendfile.... And wow!
> >
> >To quote BackupExec.
> >
> >
> >"Throughput Rate: 2264 MB/min"
> >
> >
> >Now I realize this is not a real world test, and it's not a very good
> >benchmark, but why not turn sendfile back on for kernels later then
> >2.6.15?

Good point ! The problem is how do we know what kernel we're
running on.....

This is very Linux specific. Maybe this is something the distro
vendors should change in their default smb.conf files as they
know what kernel they're using.

Jeremy.