Fast then Slow - what's going on?
A newbie to ATI. Installed 2012 hoping for faster backups than with Ghost 15 which I have used for years. Outcomes very puzzling. I have tried various combinations of compression and priority.
There is of course a correlation with overall speed given compression drives up CPU load which can create a bottleneck if overloaded and task prioritisation will also set a limit on available CPU capacity of there are contending processes. Sometimes I see this correlation and have set backup parameters which seem to optimise speed. But when I run the SAME job again, I get transfer speeds a fraction of the "best" speeds... What's going on?
Examples (Note all the destination drives are basically empty 2TB internally mounted drives i.e. SATAII interface. They have sustained writes of about 120MB/S) Each backup test is done from clean boot with no applications running and otherwise identical environment. Potentially competing services disabled (e.g. Genie timeline, which could potentially create shadow lock contention issues)
- SSD to internal HDD [Source 85GB of content ]
High compression, normal priority. (100% CPU) 93MB/S average transfer rate - HDD RAID to internal HDD [Source 810GB of content]
a) High compression, high priority. (100% CPU) 93MB/S average transfer until BSOD (repeatable error))
b) Medium compression, high (40% CPU) 93MB/S average transfer speed NO BSOD - 1 result only
c) Medium compression, high (4% CPU) 15MB/S average transfer speed NO BSOD
So I have been retrying the RAID backup but have not been able to replicate the result 2b - everything now slow. Makes a HUGE difference to backup times. What the hell is going on? Obviously, I want this to run fast ALL the time.
Anybody with any clues?
Thanks Scott procexp and resource manager give a good idea of the other processes / services going on. The ATIH processes are neither CPU nor disk bound. My guess is there is an issue potentially with shadow copy block lock conflicts. These can be cuase by a number of different programmes. The most obvious are Windows itself and the indexing service in particular, and my "belt and braces" parallel backup systems (in this case Genie timeline).
However... during testing I ensure Genie's services are all stopped and I /disable/ Windows Search process. (it auto restarts if you just stop it...) disabling genie makes no difference, disabling indexing made about 5% change in performance. Nothing like the observed HUGE performance of the best outcomes. Which - by the way- occurred without me disabling any services.
I wonder whether in the "super performance" instances, ATIH just happened to pick a window when there were no shadow locks on the partition i.e. "lucked out". It would be nice if there was a way to invoke ATIH on shutdown after all other services were killed - and have this run on a schedule. I recognise there is a "backup on shutdown" option - but the setting seems to require it to run on /every/ shutdown which is not exactly desirable. The other alternative is to backup on startup - also not really an option with an incremental backup on a 4TB partition... Or run from a separate linux boot with the volumes unmounted -- which is sure to be fast but fails the automation rest...
So seems I am still in limbo here.
btw Scott, MSCONFIG helps with load-on-launch programmes and services - but is a very slow cycle to operate. (Quicker to control services directly and use procexp to kill undesirable processes...) MSCONFIG does not address the issues of potentially conflicting drivers... And from what I am reading in the forum, there are some serious issues with ATIH 2012 low level drivers. I'd done quite a bit of dicking around with potentially conflicting processes, but with no impact on performance to date... Sigh (oh - and I forgot to mention rebooting doesn't help :-))
but serious thanks for responding. It would be nice to hear from Acronis itself on this issue...
As far as stopping services is concerned, you could right a pre script to close down services using the 'netstop' command, but you'd need to make sure you left RPC server and scheduler running.
This of course would be part of a run on evetn task.
There are only 2 reason to use msconfig. One, and the reason I suggested it in your case, is to guard aganist conflicts while installing.
The second reason would be to try to track down, by trial an error, operating conflicts.
If you can't get ati to install and read disks, as opposed to it having worked and then for some reason stopped working, then, in that case, the likely culprit is a driver issue that tech needs to address. IF you have other backup programs, even with services diabled, the drivers are properly still installed and could be presenting problems. A system report to tech couldh lep verify (or eliminate) that possibility.