Re: [Bacula-users] LZO compression on Windows Client

[Mike R. <th...@ea...>]

On 2/17/2017 04:18, Norbert Gomes wrote:
> Hi list !
>
> GZIP compression is quite slow on our Windows clients (5.2.10), it
> increases a lot the duration of theses backups. The speed of the network
> transfer is at: 20 MB/s with GZIP and 100 MB/s without compression
>
> I read that LZO would be faster, but when I enable it (compression="LZO"
> in the FileSet Include Options), no compression is applied
>
> I'm using the binary on
> https://sourceforge.net/projects/bacula/files/Win32_64/5.2.10/
>
> Is LZO enabled on these program ?
>
>
> And also, have you got some ideas to speed up my backups using
> compression (GZIP1 or GZIP6 gives the same level of performance) ?
>

As far as I know, LZO support for Windows wasn't added until version 
7.x, which is only available in the enterprise version (though you can 
use that build for personal use now).

I can confirm that it works in 7.0.5, and is considerably faster than 
gzip1, and all other compression methods available in Bacula.

A short test on this machine with a 1.6GB database table shows LZO 
(lzop.exe with default options, which should be equivalent to what 
Bacula does) running more than three times faster than gzip -1. 
146MB/sec vs 46MB/sec, or 11.1 seconds vs 35.1 seconds.  That's at a 
cost of around 10% worth of compression - LZO was 52.5% of the original, 
while gzip -1 was 42.9% of the original.  And just for comparison, bzip2 
-9 ran at 9.5MB/sec for 172.2 seconds, compressing to 38.6% of the 
original size.

Something else very much worth doing is to simply disable compression 
for file extensions that indicate already-compressed data.  Something 
like this within the file set definition:

         Options
             {
             Signature = MD5
             Wild = *.jpg
             Wild = *.png
             Wild = *.gif
             Wild = *.zip
             Wild = *.rar
             Wild = *.7z
             Wild = *.r??
             Wild = *.mpg
             Wild = *.wmv
             Wild = *.avi
             Wild = *.mov
             Wild = *.mkv
             Wild = *.mp3
             Wild = *.mp4
             Wild = *.gz
             Wild = *.bz2
             }
         Options
             {
             Signature = MD5
             Compression = LZO
             }

That uses LZO for all files that don't match the wildcard specification 
in the first option block.  Trying to use LZO on something already 
compressed, especially something compressed more highly, is going to 
accomplish either nothing or worse than nothing (i.e. output larger than 
the input).