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/>/ Hi all, />/ />/ I have a 3G AM2 quad core CPU... x86_64 centos 5.3 />/ />/ />/ When I am doing backing up to my external USB drive />/ my system becomes sluggish. Clicking on a thunderbird compose />/ takes some time to pop up the window. Typeing doesnt keep up etc... />/ />/ Is there something I can change so this backup doesnt slow my system />/ down so much? I dont see HOW it can be taking so much CPU. />/ top at times shows 0 idle or 11% idle from a USB backup. />/ />/ Thanks for any suggestions. / Define 'backing up to my external USB drive':
Are you:
- Using dump, tar, cpio, or cp?
- Are you compressing the backup? With gzip or bzip?
- Are you using zip?
If you are using bzip, bzip is a cpu hog.
How much memory do you have?
What kind of disks do you have? IDE? SATA? If SATA, is the controller in AHCI mode or IDE mode?
I have four gig RAM, I am just doing a "rsync -a /home /mnt/external_usb/backup.XX.YY.2009" My server has RAID-1 SATA 1 TB drives (two of course for raid) and I am doing a straight rsync to an external 1TB usb connected disk. Not doing any compression at this time.
The "renice" did help some mentioned earlier...
Jerry