Poor performance with EMC Networker on NW 6.5 servers

[svenix71]

Hi,

we are running EMC Networker 7.3, using a central server with Windows 2003 (connected with the tape robot via Fiber Channel), and loading the Networker agent 7.2 on several NW 6.5 SP7 servers.
Doing a backup of a NSS volum of one of these servers gives us a extremely poor data transfer performance, about less of 0.5 MB/second or less. Doing a remote TSATEST to these servers gives us theoretically more than 30 MB/second, over the SAME NSS volume (I know that the number and size of files may lower the overall performance of a backup).
Obviously these perfomances are not acceptable.
Any one has experience on backing up NW 6.5 servers with EMC Networker?

Regards,
joan

 

[Till]

Hi Joan

We have a similar environment but we have a cluster consisting of 4 physical machines and 10 virtual nodes and our throughput is between 9 and 12 MB/s.

The version number of the Networker Client is high (7.22)
but it is a really old software pith a poor performance in general, especially when you're backing up many small files.

Did you ever try a manual backup ? Try to compare between
i.e a DVD Image and many small files of the same size in total. You should see a difference then..

Did you switch on compression for example ?

cheers Till

 

[svenix71]

Thanks Till for your interest,
First of all, we are not using compression switchs.
We are using the same Networker client version of yours.

When you say 9 and 12 Mb/s is with one saveset or the result of multiplexing serveral savesets??. We, at average, get 1Mb/s for saveset...

cheers Joan

 

[Till]

Hi Joan

Well we get 9-12 Mb/s for just one saveset, sometimes it drops down to 4 or 5 Mb/s in case there are many small
files.

Here are some further hints for you, discussed in esg62557 :

Goal: Novell Performance Tuning

Fact: Novell
Fact: Networker client for NetWare
Fact: NetWare
Symptom: Backup of Novell Clients are very slow
Symptom: Backup of Novell Clients take longer than normal
Symptom: Backup of Novell Clients take longer than other similar sized clients
Change: none
Fix: The following are suggestions only. They may or may not need to be tuned in your specific application.
These settings are suggested for Novell 4.X and above only.
To set these tuning parameters you may apply them directly using the SET command on the console. To
make the changes permanent be sure to also add the set parameters to the startup.ncf file or the autoexec.ncf
file as appropriate.


Startup.ncf

Set Maximum Physical Receive Packet Size=4202 (Not always required)

Set Minimum Packet Receive Buffers=2000
Set Reserved Buffers Below 16 Meg=200 (Not always required)


Autoexec.ncf

Set Maximum Packet Receive Buffers=4000
Set New Service Process Wait Times=0.3
Set New Packet Receiver Buffers Wait Time=0.1
Set Maximum Directory Cache Buffers=4000
Set Minimum Directory Cache Buffers =500
Set Directory Cache Allocation Wait Time=0.5
Set Maximum Concurrent Disk Cache Writes=400
Set Upgrade Low Priority Threads=Off
Set Maximum Service Processes=500 (Could be higher, Recommended 2 to 3 times # of total connections.)
Set Dirty Directory Cache Delay Time=3

- Modify the Line that loads NetWorker. Currently it reads “networkr” modify it so that it reads “networkr.ncf”


TCP/IP configuration tips

Ensure that your “Set Maximum Interface MTU=1500” If you are expecting to run large recoveries.



***** Note on all above parameters. Ensure you do not have conflicting entries in the inetcfg, as these will override the settings as loaded in these files.

Hope it helps a bit ;-)

cheers Till