Acronis 2014 Backup speed limited to 100MB per second.

There are lots of places for bottle necks in file operations and lots of things affect the real world speeds, which are rarely the same as advertised burst speeds. You'd have to go through the potential bottlenecks until you found the culprit. The controller, the RAID firmware, the drive, the software.

Not to mention every step slows things down a bit. Running the compression algorithm eats up some time as well as doing the temporary file writes, etc. It's not really just a straight pour from one drive to another.

It sounds like 250MB is the max, not counting controller overhead, RAID overhead, ATI overhead, fiels system overhead, so I'd expect something less than 250 for sure, especially for continuous speeds.

Having said all that, if you don't have a lot of RAM, adding some might help by reducing how many time ati has to go to disk. E.g., if you have for or 6 going up to 8 or 12 or 16 might show a small but noticeable improvement -If ati is the bottleneck and not the controller, etc.

Thanks for the reply,
I have 32 GB of ram and core I7 3970X 6 core @ 4GHz. (CPU load is 20% whilst Acronis backup is running)
This appears to be a limitation built into Acronis of 100MB/second maximum backup speed.
It would be nice if Acronis support could confirm this.
If I do a backup Acronis maxes out at 100MB/second. To prove this I copied other data to the same backup drive whilst Acronis was running and the total drive transfer rate went up to 200 - 210 MB/Second indicating there is no bottleneck.
When I stopped the other data copy and only left Acronis backup running the transfer rate immediately went back to 100MB/Second.
Regards

Yes, Acronis will have to speak up on this one. I'm not sure why it is throttling.

+1 would also like some insight to throughput. SMB2.1, created LAG connections to NAS and changed source drive to SSD. Maximum backup throughput is +646Mbs or 80 MBs.

-- asterger

Perhaps the information here may be of some benefit:

http://www.acronis.com/en-us/support/documentation/ATIH2014/index.html#…

If I run the Windows 8/8.1 backup program "C:\Windows\System32\sdclt.exe" I get 245MB/Second so I can only assume the 100MB/Second is a limit set by Acronis.

Enchantech - Yes Performance slider set to High with no Network reduction. Average throughput has never exceeded 80MBs on a quad core with SSD. I agree with the OP as ATIH2014 throughput appears artificially limited.

-- Asterger

You might want to contact Customer service, sales, or Tech support to find out why. Acronis contact through the forum is only occasional. Genrally, it's just we users.

asterger,

Your situation appears to be network related. There are known performance issues with Samba and Win 7, 8 documented on the internet. Just google it and you will find way more than you will care to read.

Check out this links for performance tricks you can do to enhance your network performance:

http://betanews.com/2011/01/20/use-hidden-windows-tweaks-to-speed-up-yo…

Billybigun,

I agree with Scott that you should check with Support about your issue however, I think you will find that ATI in creating backups, runs multiple processes to do so and that fact is what limits throughput. As far as Windows backup is concerned all I know of that Windows does is compress the backup data while saving it.

Enchanted - Yes I am using all of the reference web settings. I can easily hit 1 Gigabit/per second via Robocopy'ing a 1GB file to my NAS versus ATI2014 backup average of 646 Mbs.

Robocopy is not performing as many processes doing a file copy as ATI is with a backup. In my opinion this is where the difference lies. You can verify this with Acronis Support.

Yes true, however, ATI2014 thread usage seems too conservative. I've observed about the same number of threads spawned whether running on a 4-core or 2-core machine, which I thought was strange. While it shouldn't be the default, it should be possible to saturate a multi-core CPU machine with ATI2014 backup if one is willing to accept the consequences.

-- Asterger

I don't think it's written to take advantage of 4 cores.

I was not specifically referring to thread or core usage. The ATI app performs various steps to create a backup. The larger the backup image the slower these steps will be in operation. This in turn will limit transfer speed.

Question, you say your CPU usage never exceeds 20%, what is you RAM memory usage at this same point? How much RAM and what type of CPU are in your NAS? Might not your bottleneck be attributable to your NAS and not your PC nor ATI?

Enchanted - Assume you're directing this to the OP as I never mentioned CPU utilization by percent.

Apologies, my mistake noted. In your case, there are many aspects to the equation of data transfer speed over a network. Realistically in most cases, 80MBs to 110 MBs is the high end limit of such transfers and is considered quite good. This applies to all current consumer level equipment and technology. Do some googling on the net for maximum data transfer speeds on gigabit network and see what you find.

Enchanted - Yes I am IT consultant with 20+ years in the field, my specialty is database performance tuning. This involves all platform layers and usually boils down to RAM, internal I/O, CPU, Network or application coding. Seems Acronis hasn't kept up with multi-core technology.

-- Asterger

I understand, it is good that you have a good deal of experience in the field. What I know is that in most cases when looking at real world maximum throughput 110MBs seems to be the limit. Now that is not to say that ATI might not be using CPU cycles to their fullest potential but honestly if they did I would think the complaints about ATI in action completely hobbling a machine from doing anything else would be through the roof. If you can find a way to achieve greater speeds I think the community would be very interested in how you accomplished it, I know I would!

There is a work around mentioned in this link: https://forum.acronis.com/forum/63656 but it would be nice if Acronis allowed the user to set the limitation as an option.

I have attached how to do the fix

I'm so excited that someone else is using my workaround! Now if we could only figure out how to pressure Acronis into changing the default or giving the ability to change the limit in the GUI.

Jmart - Many thanks for your information - The initial backup of my Steam games drive (2 TB) used to take 5.5 hours and as a test I did a full backup and it completed in just over 2 hours and now uses the full capability of my system. Incremental backups are also much faster as the read speed is also up by 250%.
Thanks
Billybigun

Current default values for these settings. These are extracts from actual script files from within a stored backup.
disk image backup to both internal & external disk.

2015
net_speed_limit speed_limit_mode="absolute" value="0"
disk_speed_limit speed_limit_mode="absolute" value="0"

2014
net_speed_limit speed_limit_mode="absolute" value="0"
disk_speed_limit speed_limit_mode="absolute" value="99999"

2013
net_speed_limit speed_limit_mode="absolute" value="0"
disk_speed_limit speed_limit_mode="absolute" value="99999"

I am very happy to have been proven wrong (at least about versions pre 2015)

Well, looks like this can finally be laid to rest! That is unless you are staying with a version prior to 2015!

Which in no doubt many people do - so thanks for this useful information and the easy doc!