[gpfsug-discuss] mmbackup questions

[Marc A Kaplan]

Along with what Fred wrote, you can look at the mmbackup doc and also peek
into the script and find some options to look at the mmapplypolicy RULEs
used, and also capture the mmapplypolicy output which will better show you
which files and directories are being examined and so forth.

--marc



From:	"Frederick Stock" <stockf at us.ibm.com>
To:	gpfsug-discuss at spectrumscale.org
Cc:	gpfsug-discuss at spectrumscale.org
Date:	10/17/2019 08:43 AM
Subject:	[EXTERNAL] Re: [gpfsug-discuss] mmbackup questions
Sent by:	gpfsug-discuss-bounces at spectrumscale.org



Jonathan the "objects inspected" refers to the number of file system
objects that matched the policy rules used for the backup.  These rules are
influenced by TSM server and client settings, e.g. the dsm.sys file.  So
not all objects in the file system are actually inspected.

As for tuning I think the mmbackup man page is the place to start, and I
think it is thorough in its description of the tuning options.  You may
also want to look at the mmapplypolicy man page since mmbackup invokes it
to scan the file system for files that need to be backed up.

To my knowledge there are no options to place the shadow database file in
another location than the GPFS file system.  If the file system has fast
storage I see no reason why you could not use a placement policy rule to
place the shadow database on that fast storage.  However, I think using
more than one node for your backups, and adjusting the various threads used
by mmbackup will provide you with sufficient performance improvements.

Fred
__________________________________________________
Fred Stock | IBM Pittsburgh Lab | 720-430-8821
stockf at us.ibm.com


 ----- Original message -----
 From: Jonathan Buzzard <jonathan.buzzard at strath.ac.uk>
 Sent by: gpfsug-discuss-bounces at spectrumscale.org
 To: "gpfsug-discuss at spectrumscale.org" <gpfsug-discuss at spectrumscale.org>
 Cc:
 Subject: [EXTERNAL] [gpfsug-discuss] mmbackup questions
 Date: Thu, Oct 17, 2019 8:00 AM

 I have been looking to give mmbackup another go (a very long history
 with it being a pile of steaming dinosaur droppings last time I tried,
 but that was seven years ago).

 Anyway having done a backup last night I am curious about something
 that does not appear to be explained in the documentation.

 Basically the output has a line like the following

         Total number of objects inspected:      474630

 What is this number? Is it the number of files that have changed since
 the last backup or something else as it is not the number of files on
 the file system by any stretch of the imagination. One would hope that
 it inspected everything on the file system...

 Also it appears that the shadow database is held on the GPFS file
 system that is being backed up. Is there any way to change the location
 of that? I am only using one node for backup (because I am cheap and
 don't like paying for more PVU's than I need to) and would like to hold
 it on the node doing the backup where I can put it on SSD. Which does
 to things firstly hopefully goes a lot faster, and secondly reduces the
 impact on the file system of the backup.

 Anyway a significant speed up (assuming it worked) was achieved but I
 note even the ancient Xeon E3113 (dual core 3GHz) was never taxed (load
 average never went above one) and we didn't touch the swap despite only
 have 24GB of RAM. Though the 10GbE networking did get busy during the
 transfer of data to the TSM server bit of the backup but during the
 "assembly stage" it was all a bit quiet, and the DSS-G server nodes
 where not busy either. What options are there for tuning things because
 I feel it should be able to go a lot faster.


 JAB.

 --
 Jonathan A. Buzzard                         Tel: +44141-5483420
 HPC System Administrator, ARCHIE-WeSt.
 University of Strathclyde, John Anderson Building, Glasgow. G4 0NG


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