ABR11 build 17437 poor USB 3.0 performance
While both backing up to an external USB3.0 drive as well as replicating from or to it, the quad Xeon CPU is maxed out to 100% and the write speed is verly limited to around 10MB/s instead of the 100MB/s during windows explorer copy of the same archive. The driver of the USB 3.0 controller (NEC/Renesas) as well as its firmware are up to date. Exactly the same applied on another machine with a different external harddisk and a controller with a different chipset. What could be the problem?
Hi Boris
What I would suggest is checking if you copy files from the server onto the USB3 device do you also get high CPU usage or not much at all?
Another thing to check into is the compression of the files you are backing up if you have ABR11 set to compress the archive (default setting) it will consume as much CPU as is available and try to use as much bandwidth is available. To check into the CPU usage you could disable ABR11’s compression and write as a flat file (not via a managed vault as this will also cause the Storage node to required resources and is generally not used for removable media).
If it happens while running under Windows, hardware implementation should not matter. Does it behave in other same way when you back up to an internal hard drive? What process consumes the CPU and what (in task manager) View->Show kernel times) show?
Hi there Datastor Australia and dev-anon, thank you for your replies. CPU usage is 100% during replication to or from USB3.0 drive, and the replication task is very slow. Replication to or from internal disk or to NAS has much lower CPU usage, and is at normal speed. Processes that take up CPU time are: storage server process (ASN User) is taking about 50% and service_process (ASN User) is taking up the rest. Changing compression to low does not change the behavior. The problem appears to be specifically USB3 related. If I take out the USB3 drive out of the chain of places where to replicate all performance is normal.
Hello Boris,
Thank you for posting. I will be happy to assist you with this issue.
Hello Datastore and dev-anon, thank you for your suggestions.
Boris, as both backup and replication to and from the USB hard drive show low performance, and you did not mention the performance of simple copy operation as suggested by Datastore, I recommend you to follow this article to troubleshoot this problem. Pay attention to the step Enabling write caching for the USB drive.
As additional troubleshooting steps I would recommend you to follow the advice of Datastore and exclude Acronis Storage Node from the backup/replication operation and create a personal vault on this external drive, as well as checking a copy operation to it with Windows Explorer. Performing a backup operation from a bootable media would also let you exclude possible issues with device drivers in Windows.
Should you need any additional help, please let me know.
Thank you.
Hi Boris
Just wanted to see how you went with the testing and if you managed to locate the cause of the issue as yet? P