Snapshot performance

[Kris Kennaway]

On Fri, Sep 01, 2006 at 11:08:51AM -0700, Paul Lathrop wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> We're working on deploying a new mail server on FreeBSD 6.1-STABLE. One
> of the major selling points was the ability to take filesystem snapshots
> in order to make backups from a consistent filesystem on such a
> high-traffic system. Unfortunately, when I take a snapshot, performance
> slows to a crawl - to the point where the system stops responding to
> network requests (ping, SMTP, etc.). Also, the snapshot takes 10-15
> minutes to complete.
> 
> Is this a typical situation? Will I need to schedule downtime for
> backups in spite of this nifty new feature? Am I doing something wrong?

Time depends on the size of the filesystem - but you are correct that
snapshots were not designed with performance in mind (rather, to speed
up booting after an unclean shutdown by removing the need to wait for
fsck).

Kris
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