Cannot work as long as rsnapshot is working

Since some time it occures everytime when rsnapshot is doing a backup for me, that it is almost impossible to work with the machine. The mouse and keyboard is responding very, very slow.
After the backup is finished I can work as before.
I didn’t change anything in the configuration of rsnapshot an the backup-medium is the same as before.

What to do to change this behaviour?

Thx!

Dieter

Seems like the I/O is overun by your backup application which means the I/O scheduler cannot keep up and your system slows down.
There is no simple solution for this. There are some kernel options you could try like switching to the Bfq I/O scheduler. Though that is something I don’t feel comfortable posting here as it is very advanced and might not really fix the issue.

thank you for your quick reply. But what does does the reply mean for me? Go shopping during the backup? :slight_smile:
Is it possible that to change the kernel itself might fix the problem? I’m using
uname -r
5.4.0-4-amd64

Ciao!

Dieter

I don’t think the kernel change would change anything.
Installing iotop to check what happens when the cursor is not moving can help to see which process is eating all the I/O and try to limit rsnapshot maybe can help.
Otherwise you need faster media.

ok, thanks.
I don’t know how to write the output of iotop in a file so I can give you here only some facts of what I have seen:

first line: Kworker with IO> 97% and prio be/4

followed by

rsync IO> between 40 - 80 % and diskread ~30M/s / ~30M/s diskwrite and prio be/4

Does this infos say something?

Dieter

Any Ideas?

Ciao!

Dieter

So that means rsync is really eating your I/O and apparently you have your external SSD connected to a slow connection (USB 2 maybe) as it only has 30M/s
Correct me if I am wrong.

This seems to be the bottleneck and the only thing I can tell you is really to let it run in the foreground in times you don’t need the computer.