[Box Backup] Housekeeping hogging the server

[Ben Summers]

On 25 Oct 2006, at 12:23, Jamie Neil wrote:

> I'm in the process of setting up a new server for backing up the other
> servers in our rack, and I was planning on using Boxbackup.
> Unfortunately it looks like it's not going to be practical due to the
> extremely high CPU loads that we are seeing.
>
> Server is a 2.8GHz Xeon with 1Gb RAM and RAID 1 SATA. Currently it's
> backing up 7 other servers with a total of 50Gb. None of the  
> accounts is
> even close to their soft limits and yet the CPU has been pegged at  
> close
> to 100% for the last 2 days.
>
> I saw this behaviour before when we were experimenting with Boxbackup
> and it turned out to be a couple of folders with thousands of small
> files in them. Once we removed them then the problem went away. I
> suspect the same problem this time as one of the servers is storing  
> mail
> in maildirs (Cyrus) and may have several folders containing a few
> thousand files each.
>
> I assume that this is a housekeeping issue because there are currently
> no clients connected.

Yes, this is most likely a housekeeping issue. The client is also not  
happy with directories with thousands of files in them. I do want to  
address this in a future version, it has come up a few times.

In the meantime, do you really need to use encrypted backups? If you  
control both the server, the client, and they're both on a network  
you manage, wouldn't rsync be better?

Ben