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#1 2019-07-02 18:41:04

admin
Administrator
Registered: 2017-04-21
Posts: 2,055

Achieving maximum speed

To be able to bring out the full speed of ©XSIBackup-Datacenter, which is probably well above your most optimistic expectations, you will need a fairly capable CPU. Don't get us wrong, a simple double core Pentium will suffice, just don't try to break some speed limit with an Atom processor.

• All Pentium, i3, i5, i7 and i9 CPUs score above the minimum requirements, even pretty old ones.
• All fairly recent ©XEON CPUs, even the low end series (E), score way over the minimum requirements for maximum speed.
• In case you find yourself in a situation in which you are limited by some single core performance limitation, i.e. you are using an Atom CPU and you can't make it better, just disable --compression on your backups and eventually allow the remote FS to perform the compression on the block chunks on the other side. This technique allows to shift part of the CPU load to the remote end when transferring data over IP.
• And do not forget to enable cache on your controller should you need to: enabling cache on an HP disk controller

Note:
We have made a correction to this text, as some tests with an old Xeon CPU were throwing poor results due to the HD controller, not the CPU itself. Most XEON CPUs since more than 10 years ago will more than suffice for ©XSIBackup-Datacenter operations.

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#2 2019-07-12 16:52:08

Tin-Man
Member
Registered: 2019-07-12
Posts: 12

Re: Achieving maximum speed

It sounds like XSIBackup-Datacenter was made to only use a single thread on a single processor, how come? In today's server environments it's not so much about getting the highest gigahertz processors anymore, most of us running cloud services often look for higher number of cores. Does this mean that if I got a 32 core processor only running 1.2ghz each that XSIBackup-Datacenter will not perform well?

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#3 2019-07-14 15:29:38

admin
Administrator
Registered: 2017-04-21
Posts: 2,055

Re: Achieving maximum speed

(c)XSIBackup-DC is a silent backup service in the background, it does not want all cores in your server, it does not need them, it must not use them, as parallelizing data reads or writes is useless. Your processing power must remain available for your services, not for some service that is overutilizing CPU in your server when it doesn't need it.

(c)XSIBackup-DC does not need more than a pentium single core to achieve maximum speed. You should only bee concerned about your CPU if you are, per instance, using some Atom CPU or some ancient XEON.

It's not all about frequency, it's the CPU architecture that determines how fast a single core will perform, one single core in your server should be enough to reach XSIBackup-Datacenter full potential.

If you find it's not achieving as it should publish here, anyway, first of all make sure that you have activated caché in your controller's BIOS, its such a common issue. HP controllers come with the cache off by default.

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#4 2019-08-25 02:14:16

Tin-Man
Member
Registered: 2019-07-12
Posts: 12

Re: Achieving maximum speed

admin wrote:

...
• In case you find yourself in a situation in which you are limited by some single core performance limitation..., just disable --compression on your backups ...

admin wrote:

XSIBackup-Datacenter is a silent backup service in the background, it does not want all cores in your server, it does not need them, it must not use them. Your processing power must remain available for your services, not for some service that is overutilizing CPU in your server when it doesn't need it.

XSIBackup-Datacenter does not need more than a Pentium single core to achieve maximum speed. You should only bee concerned about your CPU if you are, per instance, using some Atom CPU or some ancient XEON.
...

While I understand that the core of XSI Datacenter is quite efficient and may not need anything more than a single core, XSI Datascenter as a whole seems to incorporate more. Compression for example is something that can be very taxing in processing, depending on the compression settings. In fact, as it stands right now, from what it sounds to me is that compression is already the "bottleneck" of the backup operation. While I understand that it's possible to move the compression task over to the receiving server, this is not always an option, especially with cloud storage solutions. I personally prefer to set Backup operations to high priority so as to complete the backup task as quickly as possible. I'm not sure what the disadvantage of making XSI Datacenter multi-threaded other than spreading a small load across cores.

In any case, XSI Datacenter is extremely fast and quite good. I wish the menu options were more complete to match all the command line switches and email server settings, but I'm sure that will come in time.

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#5 2019-08-26 17:29:33

admin
Administrator
Registered: 2017-04-21
Posts: 2,055

Re: Achieving maximum speed

LZJB compression is almost RAM fast.
There isn't any menu in XSIBackup-Datacenter, it's all command line driven. In any case it's use is much simpler than XSIBackup, thus incorporating a menu wouldn't be as useful as in the case of XSIBackup-Pro

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#6 2019-08-28 02:07:33

Tin-Man
Member
Registered: 2019-07-12
Posts: 12

Re: Achieving maximum speed

admin wrote:

LZJB compression is almost RAM fast.
There isn't any menu in XSIBackup-Datacenter, it's all command line driven. In any case it's use is much simpler than XSIBackup, thus incorporating a menu wouldn't be as useful as in the case of XSIBackup-Pro

You are correct, I had to swtich to XSI Pro to get usable results. XSI Datacenter's limits are too stringent to generate even a single usable backup outside of the lab and no logs are being generated despite verbosity set at 10. Not very good for obtaining authorization for purchasing, the whole point of a trial is to see if it will work, not just in a lab on test VMs, in production on live servers (outside of operating hours of course). But from what I've seen, the backup operation won't even start if the VM is larger than 60GB, so there was no attempt to create a backup at all, no log entries made, no partial backup to analyze performance, no nothing.

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#7 2019-08-28 16:41:38

admin
Administrator
Registered: 2017-04-21
Posts: 2,055

Re: Achieving maximum speed

You are trying a Beta commercial version in a somewhat initial phase of development.

Of course, as it's limted to 60GB you can't backup VMs larger than that, but that is clearly stated in the program's output and in the documentation.

You should find a log in the var/log folder when you perform a backup.

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