SLOW incremental clone

Hi Albert:

Last time I had concluded that it was the "Updating Dynamic Linker Shared Cache" phase that was responsible for the slower performance. It sounds like things might be a bit different now. Can you submit your logs to me for review so I can see the most recent tasks? The easiest way to do this is from within CCC:

1. Choose "Report a problem" from the Help menu
2. Click on the "Submit Logs" tab and review the information presented
3. Click on the "Submit Logs" button
4. Update this discussion to let us know that you've submitted your logs, and please note the submission ID at the bottom of the Submit Logs tab.

Thanks,
Mike

Sent these yesterday.

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Hi Albert:

It looks like your destination disk is simply underperforming. Last time, I made a few suggestions:

If you have another USB cable, I'd try using that to see if you can get more consistent performance. I would also try attaching the enclosure to a different port on your Mac (and always directly attached to your Mac, not in a hub, keyboard, or display).

One other thing I'd do that will shave about 15% off your backups is to disable Spotlight on the destination. Spotlight is going to try to reindex your backup volume while CCC is copying files to it, and this competition for bandwidth will not only reduce the performance of your backup, it will also consume more CPU cycles. You can disable Spotlight on the destination by dragging that volume into the Privacy tab of the Spotlight preference pane.

I can see that Spotlight is still enabled on the destination, and that will certainly slow things down.

Is this disk attached directly to a port on your Mac, or is it connected to a port on your keyboard or display (e.g. if you use an external display with your laptop)?

Mike

I've disabled Spotlight in the past but I guess this was lost when I reformatted the drive.

I always attach directly to my Mac. Changing cables hasn't made much of a different.

If you can point me to a utility that will evaluate my drive, I'm prepared to replace it, if I need. I would probably get a USB 3.0 drive now.

Hi Albert:

I don't use any particular utilities to evaluate performance, I usually do simple Finder copies to determine the amount of bandwidth that the disk can provide. I usually repeat the following kinds of tests a few times each:

1. Copy a single, very large file, e.g. 10-20GB. You have an 18.09 GB file somewhere on your startup disk, perhaps a Windows virtual machine file, or a video file.
2. Copy a folder full of smaller files that add up to about as much data. I usually use the Applications folder for this, it has lots of small files and extended attributes, so it's a good evaluation of the destination disk's seek performance.

A USB 2.0 device should deliver 30-40MB/s for a single, large file. I would expect about half that performance for the second test.

Mike

I purchased a new USB 3.0, 2 tb WD drive and again moved to clone my hard
drive.

Over 25 hours from Friday night it did not complete.
I remembered to turn off Spotlight tonight and have twice tried to do an
incremental clone, again not completing either time.

I notice that the readout shows it checking individual items from within
different file packages during the cloning.

The only thing I can think of is the F-Prot running on my system somehow
interacting.

Here, again, are the current logs.

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Hi Albert:

AV software can interfere with backup tasks:

Antivirus software may interfere with a backup [LINK NO LONGER EXISTS]

If you disable that software for the duration of the backup, does that change the outcome?

Mike

No

Hi Albert:

While the backup task is not running, choose "Disk Center" from CCC's Window menu and click on the destination volume. The Disk Center will indicate the current read and write rate of that volume. Are these values basically flat before the backup task runs, or is there some other activity on this disk? If there is steady activity, I would open the Activity Monitor application and see what other applications are consuming a lot of CPU and potentially bandwidth on the destination volume.

Keep that window open and run your backup task manually. I'm curious if the read/write rates follow CCC's activity, and whether those rates drop when CCC's write activity to that disk drops. If it does not, again use the Activity Monitor application to see if there is some other application consuming CPU and potentially bandwidth on the destination volume.

Lastly, I'm curious whether your system log or kernel offers any clues about this issue. You can find these two logs in the Console application, can you attach those here. Please resubmit your CCC log via the Submit Logs tab of CCC's Help window as well so I can match up the activity in the system and kernel logs with your most recent backup tasks.

Thanks,
Mike

Disk Center:
- When the program is running it switches back and forth between read and write, dropping the value of one for the other.
- There is nothing in the background on Activity Monitor that shows up.

I'mm submitting all the files you've requested here. One thing I noticed
this evening is the file on which it hung tonight, which is not consistent
by any means, is a JPG. The other files it's hung on are trash from within
Endnote X5 or X6. Here is a screen shot, in any case.

I'm guessing you are as perturbed as I'm annoyed by this.

In any case, thanks for responding.

On 12-11-26 1:38 PM, "Mike Bombich"
[email protected] wrote:

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Hi Albert:

We have some smoking guns in your kernel log. Here's what I'm seeing when your backup task starts:

Nov 27 18:55:46 AJKs-MacBook kernel[0]: fsauth: timed out waiting for request 86627 (type = 3, pid = 29, uid = 0, file = /Volumes/2TB Laptop Backup/.fileflags_compat)
Nov 27 18:55:46 AJKs-MacBook kernel[0]: fsauth: did not get file access response!
Nov 27 18:55:47 AJKs-MacBook kernel[0]: fsauth: timed out waiting for request 8664c (type = 4, pid = 17326, uid = 0, file = /Volumes/2TB Laptop Backup/mach_kernel)
Nov 27 18:55:47 AJKs-MacBook kernel[0]: fsauth: did not get file access response!
Nov 27 18:56:27 AJKs-MacBook kernel[0]: fsauth: timed out waiting for request 8703b (type = 4, pid = 17326, uid = 0, file = /Volumes/2TB Laptop Backup/mach_kernel)
Nov 27 18:56:27 AJKs-MacBook kernel[0]: fsauth: did not get file access response!
Nov 27 18:56:30 AJKs-MacBook kernel[0]: fsauth: timed out waiting for request 8703c (type = 1, pid = 17407, uid = 501, file = /bin/sh)
Nov 27 18:56:30 AJKs-MacBook kernel[0]: fsauth: did not get file access response!
Nov 27 18:56:36 AJKs-MacBook kernel[0]: fsauth: timed out waiting for request 8703d (type = 3, pid = 11383, uid = 501, file = /Users/AlbertKirshen/Library/Preferences/com.intego.WashingMachineHelper.plist.lockfile)

[repeats almost 8000 times]

These are indeed coming from the F-Secure kernel extension, and that is indeed associated with a significant performance decline:

http://community.f-secure.com/t5/Mac-Protection/F-Secure-Mac-Protec...

I expect these problems to subside when you uninstall F-Secure completely.

Mike

That worked.

Does this problem present with any of the other "antivirus" software? MY
university will give me Symantec for download and I was wondering.

On 12-11-28 10:27 AM, "Mike Bombich"
[email protected] wrote:

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Hi Albert:

There are several other AV packages that we've seen problems with, I list a few of them here:

Antivirus software may interfere with a backup [LINK NO LONGER EXISTS]

Symantec Internet Security is on that list, we've seen several reports of that software causing kernel panics during a backup task. The general problem with AV software is that it actively scans the destination while CCC is writing to it. This not only imposes a huge stress on the system, but it's a lot of work for the AV software to keep up with CCC's copying, so that can expose bugs in the AV software. Ideally, if you could just instruct whatever AV software you have to ignore a particular volume, that should alleviate the conflict.

Mike