For the same customer I am exploring ZFS for backups, the twin server is using regular LVM and XFS. On this twin, I have setup mylvmbackup for a more conservative backup approach. I quickly found some odd behaviors, the backup was taking much longer than what I was expecting. It is not the first time I saw that, but here it was obvious. So I recorded some metrics, bi from vmstat and percent of cow space used from lvs during a backup. Cow space is the Copy On Write buffer used by LVM to record the modified pages like they were at the beginning of the snapshot. Upon reads, LVM must scan the list to verify that there’s no newer version. Here’s the other details about the backup:
- Filesystem: 2TB, xfs
- Snapsize: 60GB
- Amount to backup: ~600GB
- Backup tool: mylvmbackup
- Compressor: pbzip2
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