Yet Another Slow Copying Issue Thread

[jduv]

I'm having the same problem copying a fresh sparse image over to a 1TB WDD MyBook Studio. I realize that people are having troubles with this particular line of disk, but before I upgraded to Leopard SD! was performing backups in less than 30 minutes and I haven't had any issues with the drive at all. Now its taking nearly double that. I'm experiencing copy rates of 9 mb/s all the way up to sometimes 22 mb/s whereas on Tiger it was much faster than this.

Any ideas as to what the problem may be? I put the backup folder on my external in spotlight's privacy list and that didn't speed it up any.

Thanks!


An observation: the backup I just performed seemed to start out fast and gradually degrade as it moved from folder to folder. It started out at 22 mb/s when copying my users folder, but by the time it hit the Library and System folders it was down to 9mb/s. It just started on the Applications folder and its down to 8.5 mb/s. Interesting. Here's a section of the log:

| 05:10:43 PM | Info | /
| 05:10:46 PM | Info | /cores
| 05:10:46 PM | Info | /Network
| 05:10:46 PM | Info | /.vol
| 05:10:46 PM | Info | Ignoring /.vol
| 05:10:46 PM | Info | /.Trashes
| 05:10:46 PM | Info | /bin
| 05:10:46 PM | Info | Ignoring /.hotfiles.btree
| 05:10:46 PM | Info | /.Spotlight-V100
| 05:10:46 PM | Info | Preserving /.Spotlight-V100
| 05:10:46 PM | Info | /Users
| 05:21:17 PM | Info | /Developer
| 05:29:58 PM | Info | /Library
| 05:43:34 PM | Info | /sbin
| 05:43:34 PM | Info | /usr
| 05:46:40 PM | Info | /System
| 06:02:05 PM | Info | /private
| 06:02:05 PM | Info | Ignoring /private/var/vm/sleepimage
| 06:02:12 PM | Info | Ignoring /private/var/vm/swapfile0
| 06:02:23 PM | Info | Ignoring /private/var/db/BootCache.playlist
| 06:02:23 PM | Info | Ignoring /private/var/db/volinfo.database
| 06:02:23 PM | Info | Ignoring /private/var/run/syslog.pid
| 06:02:23 PM | Info | Ignoring /private/var/run/configd.pid
| 06:02:23 PM | Info | Ignoring /private/var/run/DirectoryService.pid
| 06:02:23 PM | Info | Ignoring /private/var/run/pcscd.pub
| 06:02:23 PM | Info | Ignoring /private/var/run/com.apple.blued.launchd
| 06:02:23 PM | Info | Ignoring /private/var/run/diskarbitrationd.pid
| 06:02:23 PM | Info | Ignoring /private/var/run/ntpd.pid
| 06:02:23 PM | Info | Ignoring /private/var/run/mds.pid
| 06:02:23 PM | Info | Ignoring /private/var/run/automount.initialized
| 06:02:23 PM | Info | Ignoring /private/var/run/appfwd.pid
| 06:02:23 PM | Info | Ignoring /private/var/run/resolv.conf
| 06:02:23 PM | Info | Ignoring /private/var/run/mach.sym
| 06:02:23 PM | Info | Ignoring /private/var/run/mds
| 06:02:23 PM | Info | Ignoring /private/var/run/smb.conf
| 06:02:23 PM | Info | Ignoring /private/var/run/nmbd.pid
| 06:02:23 PM | Info | Ignoring /private/var/run/hdiejectd.pid
| 06:02:23 PM | Info | Ignoring /private/var/run/utmpx
| 06:02:23 PM | Info | Ignoring /private/var/tmp/com.apple.speech.synthesis.globals
| 06:02:23 PM | Info | Ignoring /private/var/tmp/launchd
| 06:02:23 PM | Info | Ignoring /private/var/tmp/com.WD.WDDriveManagerService
| 06:02:23 PM | Info | Ignoring /private/var/tmp/mds
| 06:02:26 PM | Info | Ignoring /private/tmp/launchd-120.K2Ktvy
| 06:02:26 PM | Info | Ignoring /private/tmp/launch-wsw2iO
| 06:02:26 PM | Info | Ignoring /private/tmp/launch-c5zWZS
| 06:02:26 PM | Info | Ignoring /private/tmp/launch-K5kI5P
| 06:02:26 PM | Info | Ignoring /private/tmp/SDTargetImageDevice
| 06:02:26 PM | Info | Ignoring /private/tmp/target.indexState
| 06:02:26 PM | Info | /Applications
| 06:09:12 PM | Info | /dev
| 06:09:12 PM | Info | /.fseventsd
| 06:09:12 PM | Info | Preserving /.fseventsd
| 06:09:12 PM | Info | /net
| 06:09:12 PM | Info | /home
| 06:09:12 PM | Info | /Volumes
| 06:09:12 PM | Info | Ignoring /Volumes/Masamune
| 06:09:12 PM | Info | Ignoring /Volumes/Saya
| 06:09:12 PM | Info | Ignoring /Volumes/MEDIAVAULT
| 06:09:12 PM | Info | Ignoring /Volumes/MasamuneLeopardBackup
| 06:09:12 PM | Info | Evaluated 697998 items occupying 30.65 GB (125694 directories, 549801 files, 22503 symlinks)
| 06:09:12 PM | Info | Copied 697876 items totaling 28.41 GB (125675 directories, 549699 files, 22502 symlinks)
| 06:09:12 PM | Info | Cloned 28.41 GB of data in 3509 seconds at an effective transfer rate of 8.29 MB/s

[dnanian]

That doesn't seem unreasonable, given that it was copying basically the full thing...

[jduv]

Hmm even on a firewire 800 interface? Maybe I'm just crazy and it was taking an hour or so to back up everything in Tiger but I thought it was much faster than that. I'm tempted to load up my old Tiger image and see if that's true. If I do that I'll post the results. It might be a good exercise in booting from a different image =D.

Thanks for the quick reply and an awesome product!

[dnanian]

Leopard is definitely a bit slower doing file I/O, plus there's more metadata, etc. You're going to see slower performance.

[jduv]

Leopard is definitely a bit slower doing file I/O, plus there's more metadata, etc. You're going to see slower performance.

Totally true.

The Tiger backup was nearly 45% faster than the leopard backup. I was seeing 24-28 mb/s the entire time.

Thanks for your support and being a good sport about my whining =).

[dnanian]

On a full backup or a smart update of something already there?

[jduv]

On a full backup.

[dnanian]

I've never seen SD! -- on a full, non-smart update, do speeds anywhere even close to that.

[jduv]

Okay just tried again.

You are correct, I was doing a smart update last time (thats the settings I last had saved). My mistake. It looks like it's getting near the same speeds I'm getting on Leopard--maybe a little faster.

Thanks for answering my questions =).