Version running is DB2 9.5 Workgroup edition

I have a database in production and a database in development. The database in development is actually about 6 months old and was a copy of production. The database in development is running on a vm, running x64 windows 2003 with 6gb of memory. The production database is windows 2003 x64 has 20 gb of memory, is a physical box. Each box is connected to an emc nas, each box has four volumes/ four seperate file systems in which the database is configured to backup to. The issue I have is the 200GB database will backup in about 2 hours in development and takes almost 7 hours in production. I've gone over disk config and everything with a fine tooth comb and cant of the life of me understand why backups are taking so long in production. The last config i used for he backup command based on the config from the gui backup setup was:

backup database pms3 to "f:\","g:\","h:\","i:\" with 10 buffers buffer 1024 parallelism 4

The backup starts off like gangbusters in production almost 10% complete after first 10 minutes, and seems to eventually hit a wall and starts to crawl. Not sure else is going on disk wise across entire nas, and just cant figure out if it could be something with the structure of the database itself? any thoughts you might have would be great. like i said, the weird thing is the performance on the vm thats running a copy of the db from 5 months ago seems to have decent backup performance. processor on production database is doing nothing, lots of memory available. i understand some suggest not applying any settings while issuing the command to kickoff backup, but have tried several different ways with similar results, including not issue any extra commands.

I've also copied out the config from the db to diplay:
"Applications","AVG_APPLS","AU - Anonymous - W4g7tATC - Pastebin.com

one last thing to share, is i did a dump of the config parms on each box and then compraed the two
left side is production(slow backup) right side is dev(fast backup)
http://imagebin.ca/img/3xN2Rp.png

I'm not really a db2 admin, just trying to fill the role since our vendor cant

The Parameters in the Image show that the Parameters are set to automatic, so during backup you might have other values.

Do the Backup-Images have the same size for DEV and Prod? If the DB uses DMS-Tablespaces, the 200 GB might be preallocated, but nearly empty on dev.

First i'ld remove the 'with 10 buffers buffer 1024 parallelism 4'. DB2 will now compute values for the buffers and parallelism. If you are IO-bound, then you might want to use compression for backups:
backup database pms3 to "f:\","g:\","h:\","i:\" compress

Are any other IO-intensive Jobs on the Storage during the backup?

thanks for following up, looking into possibly IO contention during the same time. Will also try your suggestion of running the backup with no parameters. Not sure i follow your comment about the automatic settings in the diff file image i show? thanks again for your help

You may also want to compare the following between prod and dev:
util_heap_sz
num_ioservers
bufferpool sizes
HWM (high-water mark) for DMS tablespaces. db2 will backup pages up to the HWM


Check if there is any lock contention while the backup is executing. You can also test how long it takes to backup to /dev/null

What's quickest way to find those settings? Sorry, like I said a bit new tondb2

db2 get db cfg for <db name>
db2pd -d <db name> -buf
db2pd -d <db name> -tab

so I have the following

for db2pd -d <db name> -buf
http://imagebin.ca/img/BEuaz2iR.png
for db2pd -d <db name> -tab
http://imagebin.ca/img/QZUxK3eX.png

UTIL heap size is 524288
num_ioservers is automatic

any help or insight you can provide on those settingst would be great. like i said, db util is super low when backup runs and the amount of memory used is never about 3-4GB with 20gb avail

Hi,

backup is an IO Task. The DB reads a set of Pages and flushes them into the backup file.
You don't need much Cache for these Actions.

Is DB2_PARALLEL_IO set?
>db2set -all | grep DB2_PARALLEL_IO
[i] DB2_PARALLEL_IO=*

Is there one large table consuming nearly all the disk-space?

that parm is not set, and not sure best way to asses which tables consume x amount of space??

Take few snapshot of the memory / cpu usage of your WINDOWS box during the time the backup is running. RESET your monitors, and take few database SNAPSHOTS as well during the time the backup is running.

You should set DB2_PARALLEL_IO. Also check the Documentation for this Parameter, you maybe could fine-tune it. Setting the Parameter requires a restart of the Instance.

Is there a single huge file in e:\db2\node0000\sql00001\sqlt0002.0\?
If your statistics are up to date, you could also check if there is a table with a significant higher card than the other tables.

there are several large files, largest being 42GB/24GB/16GB/15GB/15GB/9GB/8GB and so on, thoughts??

Is this info from slow or fast server? Your default bufferpool is ~2GB, userspace1 is ~175GB, You said you have 20GB of RAM in prod. Why don't you increase this bufferpool (the last column "Automatic" is missing in the db2pd -buf output). If it's set to automatic, try hard-coding it to some higher value (let's say 10GB) and test the backup.

You should also test how long it takes to backup to NUL (for Windows).

sorry, this was coming from the slow backup server, the physical box with lots of memory/cpu. i'm not getting a column automatic in the db2pd -d pms3 -buf and thanks for spending the time to help

also, the idea of backuping up to null is just to take the disk out of the picture is that accurate?