7.4.6 Slow Performnce, Unusable?
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#536 7.4.6 Slow Performnce, Unusable?
Version 7.4.6 - May 15, 2014
With the Version 7.4.6 - May 15, 2014, backups have gone from minutes (for incremental) to hours (for a full backup) to more than 1 day (in fact, they will not complete within reasonable time)--rendering Areca unusable.
System:
i7 x64, 32 GB memory, SSD drive, Magnetic drive (7200), Java JRE x64, external drive connected via USB 3.0 (2TB)
Old Performance:
A full backup to external drive of about 135GB took approximately 4 hours. Daily incremental backups took a few minutes.
New Performance:
A full backup cannot complete. With only Areca running, attempted full backups failed after over a day of waiting (probably less than 1/4 of the backup took place). Tried twice with reboot in between. External backup drive connected via USB 3.0. (Even the daily incremental backups to a different external hard drive also via USB 3.0 now fail due to time-outs.) even tried creating a new backup set. Same results. Seems to "choke" on directories with multiple files.
Summary:
Cannot reliably run backups because performance extremely slow.
(NOTE: I have checked the Areca archives and see that slow performance has been an issue in the past. Even with antivirus turned off, same slow results. This is new for me, however--backups worked fine as recent as last week--it seems the upgrade caused problems and removing the new version of Areca does not help.)
Maybe the update has overwritten your memory-configuration (xms/xmx) for areca ?
Mathias
Thank you.
I checked the preferences.properties file (workspace...preferences) and do not see that setting. Is this where I would set such a flag? (I don't recall setting this before.)
Test
Worked on this again today. Compared to old backups (archive details), old archives about 3h15m to complete. Changed areca.l4j.ini from -Xmx512m to -Xmx8164m. No material effect.
I can confirm this behavior. I have recently updated to 7.4.6, running Windows 7 x64, Core2Duo 3.2 Ghz / 8GB Ram, with JDK 7.0.55 installed. Full Backup now takes more than one day (older Areca Versions took abou 3 to 4 hours), incremental Backup have gone up from 15 Minutes to about one hour, Merging of older Archives takes extremely long (usually 100000 Files should take about 2 hours or so, stopped the process after 10 hours of processing at about 35% progress). Setting different Memory Sizes in areca.l4j.ini does not help.
@Shannon
If I understand correctly, even when reinstalling the previous version of Areca you were using, performances are still poor ?
@Lynard : is it the same for you ?
I tried various Versions now. As long as i stay in the 7.4 branch, the performance is extremely slow (Full Backup + Merging of archives, started at 8.00 am not finished at 5 pm in the afternoon). I uninstalled the 7.4.x Version and reinstalled the latest 7.3.x Version and the merging itself of the same archive takes 30 Minutes, Full Backup of the Machine is done in 3 hours.
@aventin
First, great job on this software.
Second, yes. Even reinstalling an older copy (7.4.3) seems to still exhibit this problem. I thought that was very odd which is why I thought this might be an equipment/software issue on my end and did so much testing. But further testing seems to point to Areca itself.
@aventin
FYI: I reported more details at https://sourceforge.net/p/areca/bugs/537/ if that helps. (I only reported a second issue because the post responses on SourceForge limit the amount of text).
@aventin Confirmed on 2014-06-15 that at least older version 7.4.3 DOES exhibit the same slowness problem. On one directory, (5172 files and only a total of 5.17MB in entire directory) time to perform a full backup > 2+ hours for his directory alone. Uninstalled 7.4.6 and installed 7.4.3 to test.
@aventin @ Lynard
I anecdotally agree that the 7.4.x branch slowed down. I attributed that slowdown to my switching from Linux to Windows versions (which happened just as the 7.4.x line was released). But, on further testing, it does look like the 7.4.x generally is at least twice as slow as 7.3 up to 7.4.5. BUT something does appear to have happened at 7.4.6 which greatly magnified (order of magnitude) the slowness.
OK, thanks a lot for your help : I finally managed to find the issue. It was a regression introduced in one of the former versions of Areca - related to temporary files management (a lot of temp files could be created in some cases, which slowed down the backup dramatically)
I've fixed the issue - it should be fine by now
Could you tell me if it solves your problem ?
Sidenote : you should probably check your temporary directory : there should be a subdirectory named after your username, and inside this subdirectory, another one named "java" or "areca".
You can destroy both of them
Best regards
Installed the new Version, deleted the two directories and did a Full Backup. Archive Size 3.3 GB, 108000 files, 26000 Directories, Duration 47 Minutes. Works for me :)
Thank you for the fast reply
@aventin
I could not find the directories referenced so could not delete. Are these on the external media or in the Areca config directories--I did not see them???
I installed 7.4.7 and ran two backups last night: an incremental and a full.
Incremental: approx. 5 GB and 3443 files and took 1h18m.
Full: approx. 95 GB and 212580 files and took 7hr47m.
Restores from both are fast (I test every backup).
The new times are back in line with typical expected time requirements. Well done and seems to work for me on Windows 8.1 x64! Thank you.
Hi, I have the same issue. I moved from an old laptop to a new one (always Win10) and the time for the backup increased drastically. Now the rate is 10 GB/hour (USB3 connected external HDD, no compression): I tried to run a backup on 200 GB, previously required about 3 hours, now it was not finished after 12 hours (about half). I used Areca 7.5 (trying also 7.3.5 and to delete the temp file).
Any help? thanks