advice on speeding up the backup

[10sai]

hey guys,
i tried to search for this, but couldn't find anything really.
I'm basically using SD! for backing up a drive over a network, and it works great and all, but is pretty slow. i'm needing to backup around 300 gb.

Right now I'm looking at an access rate of 6gb/30min, which is around 3mb/s. which is okay, but i'm on a gigabit direct connection to a RAID4 array. [ips manually set on both]

right now, i'm doing a "update newer file", any ideas on where the bottleneck is happening?
thanks for the help! great app btw =)
-patrick

[dnanian]

We're running as fast as the OS lets us, Patrick... but there's a lot of "small" I/O involved in comparing all the various dates, copying small files, etc.

Note, though, that I get a much better rate with an Infrant ReadyNAS: I get about 6MB/s on a fresh copy and much more than that doing a Smart Update.

[10sai]

yeah i figured it wasn't the app's fault; unless different copy methods were slower/faster than others. i was also curious if differnet copy methods used different amount of resources; whether a "smart copy" would use more RAM/CPU than a simple copy over new or different files.
i'm also curious where someone would start to diagnose it, whether it'd be at the network level, the array level, etc.
-patrick

[dnanian]

Well, certainly Copy Newer would do a bit less stat-ing, but that stuff would likely be pretty cached. I don't think you'll see much of a difference...

Diagnosing will likely be quite difficult: you'd have to look pretty carefully about the pattern of I/O on the far side of the link, and I'm not sure you'd be able to make it much better without a lot of control of both sides.

[10sai]

thanks for the replies man, keep up the fantastic work! :)