Zimbra backups taking a *long* time

[lindsey]

We've been putting off upgrades to our Zimbra server because we haven't been able to get a good backup. Apparently one of the full backups was corrupt and the incrementals couldn't work from it, but the fulls kept dying.

Last night I babysat the full backup that I started at 6pm. It just finished, 18 hours later. There are 426 users on the system and the backup (not using any of the options) takes about 400MB of disk space. During the backup the server load average hovers between 6-8 (usually it's 1-3).

This is just a 'zmbackup -f -a all'. Should it take this long? Last time we did a backup it was only taking three hours, but I don't know yet if user mailbox sizes have changed significantly.

I haven't tried the synchronous backup flag yet.

Thanks for any tips/pointers.

[bdial]

it usually comes down to storage. what kind of storage is your /opt/zimbra/backup on?

[lindsey]

Originally Posted by bdial

it usually comes down to storage. what kind of storage is your /opt/zimbra/backup on?

It used to be on the same 4.5 TB hardware RAID that the main data store was on, but now it's on a separate attached disk.

data writes to this disk are about twice as fast as data reads the RAID.

What's odd is the sudden slowness since the last upgrade to 5.0.18, increasing the time six-fold.

Chris

[bdial]

were you running compressed backups before? i think i've seen cases where on upgrades the -z flag was removed from the zmbackup schedule. comprssed backups have always ran faster for me

[lindsey]

Originally Posted by bdial

were you running compressed backups before? i think i've seen cases where on upgrades the -z flag was removed from the zmbackup schedule. comprssed backups have always ran faster for me

We weren't running compressed backups before. I tried it a couple of times, but it slowed things down even more. The machine has two quad-core Xeon E5345 processors and 32GB of RAM.

Chris

[jwhitaker]

Hi Chris - did you ever resolve this issue? After a v5 to v6 upgrade, our full backups are taking a lot longer than they used to. Sounded like a similar issue. Thanks for any info.

[iway]

6.0.x uses zip compression. That might be why it takes longer. Have you tried disabling it with the --noZip addition?

[jwhitaker]

How did so many of us miss that on a v6 upgrade? Thanks for the pointer, I'm sure that is it, especially with other threads talking the same:

Backup compression

6.0.2 Huge increase in disk usage?

Network edition backup question - number of incremental/fulls ?