Arcserve Windows agents low throughput

[tsgdgcs]

We are running arcserve R11.5 sp3 on windows2003 server connected to a HP LTO ultrium 3 drive. Also we have installed Arcserve backup agents on several other windows2003 servers.
The problems we are experiencing is extremely low throughput when trying to backup to remote machines using the agents. We ae getting throughput of 2 MB/Minute making backups using the agent on remote machines unusable.

Are there any parameters or settings that can affect throughput that I should be looking at? Perhaps some registry keys that we can amend? We hve checked the network and switches and confirmed that there are no problems there, the issue seems to lie with Arcserve itself.
Any help please?

 

[davidmichel]

first off check the throughput for each session to each system, including the local system. If some are high then it is not ARCserve.

Next just as a baseline you need to use multiplex to obtain the full throughput potential of LTO3 drives.

Monitor the backup. Job Status window right click on the job to open a window that will show close to real time activity including performance.

Check for other running applications such as virus, spyware, defrag.

 

[tsgdgcs]

Thanks for your reply davidmichel
All Agents are bad except the local system which is getting 500-600 MB/minute.
Virus Scanning is disabled. No defrags are running.
When monitoring the backup throughput is about 2 MB/Minute consistantly for all the agents. Our network team have looked at the network and rebooted switches and can find nothing wrong. We have checked speed and duplex settings on the NIC's as well. I have noticed in the registry settings for Arcserve that there are numerous parameters including things such as buffsize etc. Could any of these parameters on the agent side and the host side affect throughput?

 

[WhiskeyMan]

I have seen alot of these issues on our network and it took awhile to figure out.
First I would suggest that you verify that TOE is off on your NIC's. Some NIC's list them as offload, but that is still TOE.
When we turned it off, things dramatically increased.

You can also look at the following link, paying attention to the data packet buffers. We had to take action on the registry on only a couple of the servers that were still going slow.

http://supportconnect.ca.com/sc/kb/...&docid=266854&bypass=yes&fromscreen=kbresults

one last thing to look at, is after you have tried the previous two, change your duplex to half. It sounds stupid, but that also helped us out in one particular instance

 

[davidmichel]

The dumbing down may often help when running and the higher performance setting such as full duplex result in a high number of errors when sending packets or the switch or NIC at the other end is set for half duplex.

But if it "is" "all" remote data transfers that is slow look to the configuration or NIC in the ARCserve server. If it is sharing an IRQ with another card try moving it to another slot.

As a test try a copy via Windows of a large amount of data from one of these target systems to the ARCserve server.