[Dirvish] performance issues with dirvish

[Shawn (Red Mop)]

On Tuesday 17 February 2009 02:37:16 pm Frederik Braun wrote:
> Hi folks,
> I'm using dirvish for a few weeks now and have some questions regarding
> its performance.
> During the last weeks I've been performing backups of several partitions
> of my harddisk, but somehow the most critical "fails": my root partition.
> The first backups took less than an hour, so I tried rather often
> running the weekly¹ backup of my root partition manually. Actually, I
> allowed dirvish to run for more than 24 hours on Tuesday. Turned out,
> that there were some NFS errors (yeah, I'm copying files over to a NFS
> share). So I took care of them and started dirvish again today.
> After two hours of running, dirvish still wasn't finished - should I be
> more patient? Also I found out, that after killing dirvish there were
> *two* rsync-processes left running...apart from the fact that dirvish
> should maybe tell rsync to quit, when killed (I sent a TERM) - why are
>
> there two rsyncs doing the same (at least it appears so to me):
> > root      9350  0.2  0.1  14752  1820 tty2     D    19:06   0:26 rsync
>
> -vrltH --delete -pgo --stats -D --numeric-ids -x
> --exclude-from=/media/nas/backup/current/terra/20090217-1906/exclude
> --link-dest=/media/nas/backup/current/terra/20090124-1548/tree /
> /media/nas/backup/current/terra/20090217-1906/tree
>
> > root      9351  0.3  0.3  58484  3108 tty2     S    19:06   0:42 rsync
>
> -vrltH --delete -pgo --stats -D --numeric-ids -x
> --exclude-from=/media/nas/backup/current/terra/20090217-1906/exclude
> --link-dest=/media/nas/backup/current/terra/20090124-1548/tree /
> /media/nas/backup/current/terra/20090217-1906/tree
>
> Kind regards and thank you for your time,
> Frederik Braun
>
> 1) concerning the weekly backups, I thought about switching to daily or
> hourly backups...how often do you run dirvish?
>
> P.S.: You got some love from German computer magazine c't
> (http://www.heise.de/ct , issue 22/2008) that's how I got to know dirvish

We took a look at dirvish over NFS back in May (link below), and came to the 
conclusion that you should not store your vaults on NFS unless you must.  It 
is definately preferable to use rsync over ssh to transfer your data.  The 
very last post (also linked) mentioned some settings that helped speed things 
up a bit, but it is a work around.  If you can have the machine with the 
dirvish vaults run the backup itself (you only need ssh, perl, and rsync).

http://www.dirvish.org/pipermail/dirvish/2008-May/001821.html
http://www.dirvish.org/pipermail/dirvish/2008-June/001851.html

Good luck.

Shawn