Increase backup speeds by fine tuning TSAFS.NLM

  • 7002089
  • 04-Dec-2008
  • 27-Apr-2012

Environment

Novell NetWare 6.5
Novell NetWare 6

Situation

Increase backup speeds by fine tuning TSAFS.NLM

Resolution

When configuring your TSAFS settings, you need to take into account the total memory of the server, amount of available memory on the server, the number of streams in the backup job, number of usable processors (1 for NW6, multiple for NW6.5 if multiple processors present), disk channel performance (IDE, SCSI, Wide SCSI, FibreChannel), and Tape System performance.

Additional Information

TSAFS.NLM runs on Novell NetWare 6 and Novell NetWare 6.5.

TSAFS.NLM is a multi-threaded multi-processor enabled NLM. On NetWare 6.5 TSAFS will utilize all processors on the server, on NetWare 6.0sp3/4 TSAFS will only use Processor 0. Thus, the potential for faster backups is on NetWare 6.5.
TSAFS.NLM Config Options:

/? - Display this help information. [RuntimeOnly, Type: Informational]

Help - Display this help information. [RuntimeOnly, Type: Informational]

Version - Display version information for TSAFS.NLM [Type: Informational]

/ReadBufferSize - Bytes of data read by a read operation [Type: Value = 131072, Range : 16384-262144] - allocates memory (in bytes) per Buffer per backup stream. The higher the buffer, the more memory needed. Setting this too high can cause an abend by running the server out of memory.

/ReadThreadsPerJob - Number of read threads for a job [Type: Value = 24, Range : 1-32] - allocates the number of threads per backup stream. The more threads per stream, the higher the utilization of the server. Setting this value too high, combined with the number of backup streamsbcan bury your server with utilization. This is very easy with NW6.0 since TSAFS can only use Processor 0.

/ReadThreadAllocation - Maximum number of read threads (as a percentage) that can process a data set [Type: Value = 100, Range : 10-100]

/ReadAheadThrottle - Maximum number of data sets to read ahead simultaneously [Type: Value = 24, Range : 1-32] - is a means to control the number of data sets that are pre-fetched.  This affects the performance of the  interaction between the processor speed and the speed of the bus and the speed of the hard drives.  It is very individual--on smaller, slower servers the performance begins to degrade at above 4, and only makes a little bit of difference moving from two to three.  However, with the high performance disk arrays and larger, faster, multi-processor servers see performance increases up to about 28, and very little performance degradation at 32.

/CacheMemoryThreshold - Percentage of total memory that can be used for caching data sets [StartupOnly, Type: Value = 25, Range : 10-25] - limits the amount of Total Server Memory that can be used by TSAFS.NLM to allocate to its buffers for the backup job. This allows the process to be limited overall in case you do set your buffer size too high.

/(No)Cluster - Specifying whether a failback-failover is supported or not [StartupOnly, Type: (no)switch, Value = True ]
Formerly known as TID# 10091996