I've been using cloudmin for a while (with Xen), and have finally started trying to use the virtual server backup and restore. My problem is that doing backups and restores tends to completely swamp the disk on the servers (they've got - um --- probably more CPU capability than I/O capability, but that's pretty typical these days). Gist of it is that doing a backup or a restore tends to so beat up the disk on the host system that the guest systems start to have their load skyrocket, and pretty soon they're comatose untill the backup or restore finishes. This is probably made worse by the fact that some of my virtual servers have fairly big disk partitions.
I can sort of nurse this along by hand by going on the host system and using ionice to set the I/O priority of the process reading or writing the disk (usually dd) and then life is good. I've tried setting webmin's advanced settings to nice down and ionice the automated scripts -- I'm not sure if that's working or not, it sort of looks to me like it works on the cloudmin master, but not on the process it runs on the other servers, but I've not tried this real heavily yet.
Anyway -- it would be real nice if there was a way to make all this stuff on the cloudmin master and the other servers be settable to use ionice. I've been setting the priority on the backup and restore processes to be idle class, and that makes it run smoothly -- slower, but it doesnt kill the other virtual servers in the process.
Or am I missing some configuration I can already do?
Comments
Submitted by JamieCameron on Mon, 04/12/2010 - 17:51 Comment #1
Being able to set the IO priority for backups and restores would solve this. Currently Webmin has an option for setting the priority for local cron jobs, but it won't apply to those that run remote backups..
I will look into adding an option for this - it should be able to go into Cloudmin 4.3.
Submitted by cruiskeen on Mon, 04/12/2010 - 17:53 Comment #2
Thanks Jamie, that'd be great.
Submitted by JamieCameron on Mon, 04/12/2010 - 19:07 Comment #3
I've just finished implementing this, for inclusion in Cloudmin 4.3.
Submitted by cruiskeen on Mon, 04/12/2010 - 19:59 Comment #4
I dunno -- having to wait almost 24 hours between suggesting a request for improvement and having the code committed is yet another example of why people hate Open Source projects and companies that support 'em :-). Thanks. This is great.
Submitted by Issues on Mon, 04/26/2010 - 23:20 Comment #5
Automatically closed -- issue fixed for 2 weeks with no activity.