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Compression Performance costing 400% in time to backup

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I was testing a File backup of about 14.3GBs across a Gigabit Ethernet connection to a new SAMBA server and was very disappointed in the performance. It was taking about 9 minutes to back up. After several days, I have come to the conclusion that the network is not the bottleneck

I changed my test so that the destination of the backup was to a separate SSD. The backup still took about 8.5 minutes. I changed the priority from Low to Normal with almost no difference. I then turned off compression (it was set at the default of normal) and that cut the time down to 2 minutes.

My conclusion is that turning on Normal compression is costing me over 400% in the time it takes to do a backup. That seems excessive. Is that expected?

Windows 8.1 Pro
Intel Core i7-3930K at 3.2 GHz
Memory: 16GB
True Image 2013

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The effectd of compresion depends on what is being backed up. Some material is not very comrpessible , in which cas e the overhead of trying to comrpess achieves little spaces saves and costs time instead of having a net savings in time. If the data is comressible, you not only save space but the fewer bytes to write saves time to. Youmight notice in almost any case, going up to the highest level of compression costs a lot of time and has little space savings.

On most set ups, changing to low compression doesn't save much time but costs a lot of space-- Normal is deisnged to be the sweet spot formost set ups. Once networks are invovled, it's a whole diff ballgame. connection rated speed is one thing, bu the actual interaction of the elements, machiens, HDDs, routers, etc., can give very different real world results.

Also, file backups seem to run much slower in ATI than parititon backups, byte foir byte.

I agree that the network could have been an impact. In fact, it was what I originally suspected. However, by changing the target to a local SSD (not what I would usually do), I bypassed the network and went to the fastest disk that I have. I did this to remove as much as I can the effect of writing out to a disk. It did not change the backup time difference much so the problem is with the performance of ATI compression. Also, there are no options between No compression (NONE) and normal (i.e. normal == low compression). The Normal compression is compressing the data by about 36% so it is doing an ok job there.

Long ago, I used to use compressed disks (ala windows) and its impact was usually barely felt... certainly nothing like a 400+% increase. That is what surprises me.