Northampton server - backup causing high loads

[nams]

Hi,

I am on northampton server and have a number of drupal websites hosted. For the past few weeks I have been noticing websites down in the early hours of the morning uk time. And also most of my sites slow down or become in-accessible during peak surfing hours of 4pm to 10pm. On live chat I have been told a few times that the backup is running so there is high server load, so I requested backups to be moved to the early hours of a morning. It was fine for a while until again the backup moved to peak hours again.

My question is should a backup cause such heavy load on a server that the websites become so slow they hit high memory points. To me a backup should be a quiet background process with minimal load on a server. Does anyone else have these problems either on this server or others?

And also I have optimised and improved my drupal sites with caching so they run quick during normal server load so it is not this that causes issues.

[Kieran]

Re: Northampton server - backup causing high loads

Hi !

All our Linux shared servers have latest R1Soft backup technology implemented and backup task should not cause to create
load on the server or affect any other system service. Neither any client reported such issue for the same time.

I'll take a look at the cron jobs and backup config and shall let you know once the further investigation is done.
Feel free to add your comment and query in this regards.

[nams]

Re: Northampton server - backup causing high loads

Hi !

All our Linux shared servers have latest R1Soft backup technology implemented and backup task should not cause to create
load on the server or affect any other system service. Neither any client reported such issue for the same time.

I'll take a look at the cron jobs and backup config and shall let you know once the further investigation is done.
Feel free to add your comment and query in this regards.

Yes I would think a backup would not cause such an issue so have suspected something else wrong somewhere... but wheb it happens and I contact live support they tell me there is heavy load on the server due to the backups running...

[Kieran]

Re: Northampton server - backup causing high loads

Hi.

Yes, This time there wan an issue with the backup task and hence the server was overloaded.
After checking the monitoring report, I noticed that the process was stuck and in order to sort this,
we had to rebuild the r1soft drivers. Its been sorted now and the back up task is running in background.

There shouldn't be load and resources issue when next scheduled back up runs.

[nams]

Re: Northampton server - backup causing high loads

Hi Kieran,

Having monitored this now the server is a lot better, no high resources used etc. Thank you for finally helping figure this one out. I have talked to live support and raised a few tickets before. None of them got to the problem, my only complaint is that problems reported should be investigated further to identify server problems. In my case the response was to tune my site because it was causing memory failures/limits reached, but I was being told server is fine. My sites are the problems... but I knew they had worked fine for many years hosting with yourselves.

But again thanks for sorting it

[nams]

Re: Northampton server - backup causing high loads

Hi Kieran or anyone else,

Please could you take a look at my resource usage screen capture, I find each morning between the hours of 12am to usually 4am there are periods where the memory has hit high usage limits and i see many entry processes which I only saw happening when the backup was failing or over loading the server in the past. Can you tell me if this memory hit is backup related or is normal? It has occasionally happened during the day. The reason I question such high use is because 95% of the time the websites and server are fine, not more than 2 entry processes even during peak hours. I think it is unusual for this to happen at say 3am or 4am when there is minimal traffic for a UK site. I know the R1soft backup works in an incremental change as it backups up information that has changed since the last backup schedule... so wonder if it is related somewhere... Thanks

[Ben Stones]

Re: Northampton server - backup causing high loads

Hi Kieran or anyone else,

Please could you take a look at my resource usage screen capture, I find each morning between the hours of 12am to usually 4am there are periods where the memory has hit high usage limits and i see many entry processes which I only saw happening when the backup was failing or over loading the server in the past. Can you tell me if this memory hit is backup related or is normal? It has occasionally happened during the day. The reason I question such high use is because 95% of the time the websites and server are fine, not more than 2 entry processes even during peak hours. I think it is unusual for this to happen at say 3am or 4am when there is minimal traffic for a UK site. I know the R1soft backup works in an incremental change as it backups up information that has changed since the last backup schedule... so wonder if it is related somewhere... Thanks[ATTACH=CONFIG]486[/ATTACH]

Hi,

I've forwarded this onto Kieran who will look into this for you. He will respond to you as soon as possible.

Regards,

Ben Stones.

[nams]

Re: Northampton server - backup causing high loads

Hi anything yet? Also to add to this I have noticed that around 9.20pm today I was on one of the sites and saw it very slowed down but no traffic showing, on checking the resource usage I found it over loading again and saw that entry processes were getting stuck. So the heavy load is causing memory over load and high entry processes.

[Kieran]

Re: Northampton server - backup causing high loads

Hi Naminder.

Apologize for the delay in my response and inconvenience caused to you.
A helpdesk ticket has been created for the subjected issue. We will check the issue further and update
you soon. You can add additional details to ticket VNC-473-35393.