rync killing the machine

[Paul Slootman]

On Mon 26 Sep 2005, Warrick FitzGerald wrote:
> 
> I used to use cpio to archive the mail store, but that's just getting
> silly now that there's about 40GB that it needs to run through.
> 
> I tried running rsync in order to backup the data, but as soon as I
> started running the script the machine came to a grinding halt. I left
> it running for about 30 minutes while rsync said it was analyzing the
> file system but the server was un-usable and I was forced to kill it.

How many files are involved? If the number is very high, the memory
usage of rsync will cause the machine to run out of memory. 40GB of mail
would suggest a lot of little files...

In that case, see if it's possible to run rsync on subdirectories of
the tree (hardlinks outside such a subdir is a showstopper for that
approach, assuming you're using -H).


Paul Slootman