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Question

What is "Network" for a Client which is its own MA?

  • 28 January 2024
  • 2 replies
  • 53 views

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Hi,

Each job gives Read, Write, Network, and DDB lookup metrics.

I’ve always understood “Network” to be “waiting on data transfer from the Client to the MA.”

But I have a Client which is its own MA, and does parallel copy directly from itself to S3--but the “Network” number is still sometimes the highest percentage.

What does “Network” mean in this context? (The DDB does live on a different MA.)

Thanks!

Sheree

2 replies

Damian Andre
Vaulter
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  • Vaulter
  • 1207 replies
  • January 29, 2024

Hi @Sheree Grier,

So this still is reporting on a true network statistic, with the transfer between the agent (database in your example) and the Media Agent. Commvault processes will transfer data over the loopback adapter on the same machine (the same adapter responsible for 127.0.0.1). Depending on which OS you are running, the performance can vary wildly. We have seen some irregularities with some operating systems and patch levels.

There is one thing you can try to see if it improves performance. You can switch from using the loopback to using shared memory transfer instead. Its pretty easy to do - but I do not recommend this if this Media Agents is processing a lot of jobs, as the number of parallel operations will also be limited (a separate setting on the MA). Follow the instructions here and ensure the checkbox is de-selected to disable the use of the loopback adapter. You don't need to restart services, just pause/resume or restart the job to after changing the checkbox either way.

 

 


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  • Author
  • Bit
  • 4 replies
  • January 31, 2024

@Damian Andre  I tried it and I see the Network metric has disappeared entirely--which makes sense.  I can’t say the jobs are going any faster, per se, so maybe that wasn’t a bottleneck, but it’s good to know that’s how that setting works, for future performance-tweaking.  Thanks!

 

I do not recommend this if this Media Agents is processing a lot of jobs

That makes sense. This is basically a Client; the Media Agent package is only installed as a prerequisite for Oracle Synthetic Fulls.  It’s limited to just a few jobs; no more than one DB and a few DB logs at a time.  To the best of my ability, I have it configured to not participate in any other jobs besides self-backups.

 

shared memory transfer

Does that mean this config is capable of hogging the machine’s RAM?


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