CPU is 100% during backup?

[jtsnow]

Im doing image backups over my home LAN 100baseT to a Dell Dimension P3 600
XP SP2, 640mb, to USB 2.0 PCI card to 250G external harddrive.

During this backup time, CPU utilization on the P3 Server is 100% and
network is 20%.

If I do the identical backup to a installed HD on the same P3 PC the CPU
utilization is 75% and network still 20%.

Any way to make USB more efficient CPU use wise.?

What should CPU usage be for something like this?

Any insight appreciated

 

[Arno Wagner]

Im doing image backups over my home LAN 100baseT to a Dell Dimension P3 600
XP SP2, 640mb, to USB 2.0 PCI card to 250G external harddrive.

During this backup time, CPU utilization on the P3 Server is 100% and
network is 20%.

If I do the identical backup to a installed HD on the same P3 PC the CPU
utilization is 75% and network still 20%.

Any way to make USB more efficient CPU use wise.?

What should CPU usage be for something like this?

Any insight appreciated

O.K., first these numbers are not quite enough to tell what is
going on. How long do the backups take? Maybe the CPU-time
is just the networking code (network load is bandwidth, not
what the CPU takes to handle the packets), and the backup to
USB is just faster, i.e. with USB the CPU is the bottleneck?
It may well be that almost none of the CPU load is from the USB
and all is network-stack related.

Arno

 

[Mike Tomlinson]

Any way to make USB more efficient CPU use wise.?

What should CPU usage be for something like this?

I don't think USB is particularly CPU intensive. Do you have
compression enabled while doing the backup? If so, the CPU usage is
high because it's busy compressing data as it's written to the backup
destination.

 

[jtsnow]

compression occurs on the source side, not the destination side

 

[Irwin]

I just reproduced your experiment in two ways. I used drive image 2002
with compression on to make an image directly to my network backup
server, and I also made the image to a local hard drive and then just
moved it to the server. Neither used more than 20% CPU, and most of the
time it was around 10-12%. Now, I am using a 2.66 GHz P4, so obviously
the comparison isn't completely fair. I do have some older machines
around, but am too lazy to hook them up, sorry. Can it be that the
system is just that slow? Or is there some way (DMA?) to tweak the
subsystems to make it faster.

Actually, thinking about it, the bigger problem is probably your
software. Do you have a new version of anti-virus on the server? It may
be choking on these huge files and slow machine. Try turning it off for
these activities. Or exclude scanning these particular types of files.
The other problem is XP SP2 on a 600 MHz machine. I tried it on a 450
MHz machine, and it sucked. You would probably be much happier with
Windows 2000 on a machine like that, I know I was. Or even Win98SE, if
all you are using the machine for is catching backup files. And an
older version of anti-virus maybe, the new ones require too much from a
system that slow.

Irwin

 

[jtsnow]

virus scanner being off is a good idea...ill try that......yes I have XP
sp2. but it wont be practical to use anything else....so im stuck
there...but ill try turning off stuff and see if that helps

thanks