rbcollins@cygwin.com login

[Angela Marie Thomas]

> It just seems that both you and rth rsync the repositories, Angela I 
> believe also does. I think cagney at least rsyncs the src repository. I'm 
> pretty sure other people will rsync plenty of their "own" repositories. 
> And if it's rsync rather than cvsup, tagging will cause a full retransmit.
> 
> That's in addition to the (I hope) nightly tape backups.

My backups are the closest we have to "official" backups.  As such,
they consume the most bandwidth, but as Jason says, that can't
be helped.  AFAIK, I'm the only one who does the whole system and
one of the few who does it outside of rsyncd.  I'm pretty sure most
most casual folks use rsyncd which I think could be throttled if
it became a problem.

> It seems like a lot of disk and net bandwidth is going on a somewhat 
> incoherent backup strategy.

My backups are done during a window where we have the least activity
and the fewest automated processes running.  They should not (and
so far have not) have a noticeably negative impact on the system.

> > Bandwidth usage is minor.  As for disk, rsync skips files that have
> > the same mod-date and size.  So the server has to stat all the
> > files on both the client and server.  For those files that have
> > been changed, it needs to read the entire file to determine what
> > blocks need to be resent.
> 
> Which doesn't work so well after tagging :-|. Which frequently happens 
> with every generated snapshot.

Even then, it's still minor.  The time and effort backing up
/sourceware/projects is small compared ftp/mail/www.  I'd guess there
are probably 5-7 people making copies of some subset of the system.
Some do it periodically and some do it regularly.  Any time the
system is noticeably slow and I notice or someone sends email to
overseers, the problem tends to be due to things like www, htdig
or anoncvs.

> Well, at least the new machine might be able to cope better, but it at 
> least makes me wonder about the old machine.

I'm reasonably sure that the rsyncs have not been an issue.  Failing
disk drives and Linux's less than stellar SCSI drivers have been much
more of a problem.   I'm eager to see what the backup time difference
is on the new machine.  I'm hoping the faster machine/disk will make
up for the added network lag from the machine moving further from me.

--Angela