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Sun, 23 Nov 2008

/Admin/backups/misc: What Works on a Slower Machine

I have this thing about keeping older machines usable for as long as possible. In other words, I resist bloat-ware that just assumes any computer more then two years old should be placed in a dumpster. So I currently own about a half a dozen laptops, and none of them are faster then a late-model Pentium III. And this works fine for me, as long as I make judicious choices about what software should run on what machine, and when.

Getting backups done painlessly has caused just such a "judicious choice"....

As it turns out, Spideroak[1] has a lot going for it, but fast it is not. Unsurprisingly, Spideroak is a Python app, and Python is also a language that "has a lot going for it, but fast it is not". Its not just that Spideroak is just slow, but like its Python sibling, Miro[4], it tends to bog down my whole system and reduce responsiveness. For the moment, I will resist the urge to add Spideroak to my list[2] of open source resource hogs, as I have not yet experimented with running it "niced".

This brings backuppc[3] back into favor for me. And I have found a partial fix for the fact that backuppc also bogs down the server it is running on: put this is the root cron:

1 * * * * /usr/bin/renice 15 -u backuppc > /dev/null 2>&1

backuppc starts backups right on the hour. This cron job reduces the priority of all running backuppc processes one minute after every hour. Much better. And no operator intervention required, unless I am watching a really CPU-intensive video on that box and need to stop backuppc entirely.

[1] http://blog.langex.net/index.cgi/Admin/backups/spideroak.html
[2] http://blog.langex.net/index.cgi/Linux/memory-hogs.html
[3] http://blog.langex.net/index.cgi/Admin/backups/backuppc/
[4] http://www.getmiro.com/

posted at: 08:51 | path: /Admin/backups/misc | permanent link to this entry

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Sun, 23 Nov 2008