While backing up my site of only 400MB, I noticed with top c command that the user making the backup has tons of processes open and it keeps building up more and more. When I try to access the site, it gets stuck at waiting for... and does not even timeout even after several minutes.
Then Apache starts opening hundreds of processes and the load spikes to a crazy average until the backup is complete.
During the backup, I can see with top c command that the user root have many processes running and among them are 2 processes running Gzip and Tar. Gzip is using 99.9% of CPU, nice of 19. There is also a dump process running for MySQL. All these combined brings my server to over 300 load average even going up to 900 until the backup is complete.
I know that backups put extra stress on the system but this is only a 400MB site with most of the data being the database, not the entire server! This is not very efficient for making backup if the Gzip completely makes the server and sites inaccessible during backup which can take as long as 15 minutes for a 400MB site.
This is a dual core Xeon server with 2G of RAM.
Average load when not making backup is under 1, during backup the load is 900!
Then Apache starts opening hundreds of processes and the load spikes to a crazy average until the backup is complete.
During the backup, I can see with top c command that the user root have many processes running and among them are 2 processes running Gzip and Tar. Gzip is using 99.9% of CPU, nice of 19. There is also a dump process running for MySQL. All these combined brings my server to over 300 load average even going up to 900 until the backup is complete.
I know that backups put extra stress on the system but this is only a 400MB site with most of the data being the database, not the entire server! This is not very efficient for making backup if the Gzip completely makes the server and sites inaccessible during backup which can take as long as 15 minutes for a 400MB site.
This is a dual core Xeon server with 2G of RAM.
Average load when not making backup is under 1, during backup the load is 900!