What would cause this gradual performance degradation?

[cparker4486]

Hello,

I did an experiment yesterday on trying to improve the performance of my backups. I think I can categorize it as successful but it's only a marginal improvement. What I've done is setup an old workstation of mine as a backup proxy. The job is backing up all but my most unimportant VMs and you can see that it started out strong but gradually lost its steam.

Since this is an experiment and because this machine is old and uses server RAM (ECC), I am currently very limited in that department at just 4GB. I noticed that over the course of the job (which was 8h30m long) the memory utilization went up, albeit very slowly.

I wasn't able to capture a graph of the memory usage because, as I found out this morning, I hadn't setup monitoring for this machine in PRTG. But I did capture the throughput graph from B&R.

If I invest a little bit of money in getting this machine more memory (I'm thinking in the 16GB range) should I see even stronger and more sustained performance over the course of the job? Or are these two metrics merely coincidental?

[Vitaliy S.]

Hello Chris,

What's your backup job mode? Also what is your target storage and proxy server guest OS?

Thank you!

[cparker4486]

Hi Vitaliy,

Forward Incremental-Forever, a Synology DS1812+, and my normal proxy server (the Veeam B&R server itself) is on Server 2012 R2 but the experimental proxy is Win Enterprise 8.1 Update.

[veremin]

It might be worth providing full bottleneck statistics for this job to give us some clues on what might be the root cause of the behaviour. Thanks.

[Vitaliy S.]

Your issue reminds me this one - Full backup speed decreases as it runs. The only difference is that you're using Windows Server 2012 R2 as a proxy server. Is this performance decrease the same for both Windows 8.1 and Server 2012 R2 proxy servers?

[cparker4486]

It might be worth providing full bottleneck statistics for this job to give us some clues on what might be the root cause of the behaviour. Thanks.

Source 39%
Proxy 38%
Network 45%
Target 73%

[cparker4486]

Your issue reminds me this one - Full backup speed decreases as it runs.

I skimmed through this and it looks like the issue was attributed to a problem that was resolved in 6.1.

The only difference is that you're using Windows Server 2012 R2 as a proxy server.

I think it's reverse of that. The proxy I used in this case was Win 8.1.

Is this performance decrease the same for both Windows 8.1 and Server 2012 R2 proxy servers?

No, because the 2012 R2 proxy (also serves as the primary B&R server), which is a VM with 8GB of memory and 3 cores @ 2.67Ghz, is markedly slower than the physical workstation with just 4GB of RAM and 4 cores @ 2GHz.

[cparker4486]

I should say that I'm not certain this is a recurring issue. Maybe we can leave it be for the time being as this was an experimental job. If I end up creating one monolithic Backup job and I continue to see performance like this I can bring up the issue again.

[Vitaliy S.]

That would useful as well, however I would just give another proxy server a try and see if this behavior confirms or not.