Backup initiated GZIP Process causing high load and connection instability

[DaveB]

Hi,

We have a client who has a DirectAdmin server, he’s been using this for his website and emails for the past 2 years. Every week he uses the DA Backup tool to create a backup tar.gz file. This has worked fine for 2 years. Now for the past 2-3 weeks, when you initiate the backup, the GZIP process pushes server load to around 25.0-30.0. This on its own wouldn’t be a problem, but as soon as the load creeps up and the GZIP process starts creating the tar file, the server drops mail connections, and FTP connections fail and will not reconnect. FTP Connections and mail server connections both fail with timeout related error messages, which makes me think it is the load that is causing this.

Ideas?

 

[scsi]

So use nice/renice to limit the loads.

http://www.directadmin.com/features.php?id=1423

 

[nobaloney]

I'd also check to see if there's a lot of swap memory being used, and if so clear it by either restarting daemons or the entire server. But don't do this during the backup or it will break the backup.

Jeff