Q: time machine very slow with mountain lion

Hi Chipsfortea!

Did you already rename the disk in time capsule? I had the same issue in the beginning. Time Machine just kept looking for the disk for ages without finding it. I then erased and renamed the disk (from the default Data to something like BackupDisk. Someone here wrote that hint and it really was like a magic touch.

But this was in the beginng. I think it worked first with the factory settings but stopped when I played with settings a little. Unfortunately I don't know what to do if TC stops working after being ok for a couple of days.

It's the same problem with the 10.7.5 Lion update! Mr Apple do have a problem with the Time Machine!

Hello

my Mac and My son one started to have unacceptable TM performance problem after we upgraded to 10.7.5.

Before this, TM on a Ubuntu server 12.04.1 LTS (Atom dual core with hyperthreading) via AFP share was working like a charm!

Peak of 80MBytes/s till large NAS buffer where full, then average above 50 MBytes/s which is essentially limited by NAS system performances (afpd on ubuntu unfortunately seems not able to use multicores for a single user session)

Initial Backup back in May took a couple of hours for about 100GB...then all TM following backups were few minutes for even a couple of GB all inclusive "preparation and final cleaning interfaces"

Now on 10.7.5, on exactly same environment:

My MAC doing a full backup (to debug I've cleaned old TM volumes)  after 1 hour I got just 800MB have been backed up and reports 3 days for just 60GB

My son MAC with a incremental backup at same time did 600MBytes

Ubuntu NAS is idle

Wireshark on my MAC clearly shows that AFP traffic (AFP FPWriteExt request) have few bursts and then stop for about 3minutes and 20 seconds (just some control traffic is seen in between)

I think that if not due to a bug...this is unacceptable restriction.

I hope Apple fill fix it soon!

regards, Tiziano

Dan

I already erased the time capsule and started from scratch a month and a half ago - no better.

I tried a reset, now time machine doesn't recognise the old backup sparsebundle file, it seems to be backing up to a backup folder rather like 10.4 Tiger used to rather than a sparsebundle file in the data folder.

What's annoying is that I never had any problems until Mountain Lion.  The senior tech at Apple Care was apologetic about the problems and suggested a Mountain Lion reinstall;  I did this and it's made matters worse.

I'll try to escalate this to a hardware problem and get a new iMac - if they have to stump up £2000 it might focus their minds on the problem.

Is any reply from Apple about this issue? Is any call to support and got any info?

Thanks.

Lots of people experiencing time machine issues - do a web search. in 10.7.5 I resolved my time machine issues (as many others have) by switching off spotlight indexing.

I was having that same issues, but updating the OS from the AppStore tonight appears to have been the only change that was necessary for me. I also removed a lot of applications that I think my wife will not need (XCode being one of them) but none of the applications should have had an impact, so I am ignoring that bit of cleaning house.

I did nothing with the indexing, and the destination drive is on a Synology base station (2-bays).

Its possible that I might have done other things over the years, and the computer with issues was my wife's new Air (initially started from moving from my Air). If there are specific settings you want to me report, just let me know and I can do so.

I just wanted to let everyone that for me, the OS update from the AppStore worked. Good luck.

Congratulations on having a second backup plan, unlike some advice on this thread to delete the one and only backup you may have, before doing a reinstall.  What a terrible idea!  As they say, one backup is no backup...

As you discovered, the server build is a different beast and is not necessary for most people. Once it is installed, the only way to go back to a normal system is by an erase/install, so again, an external bootable clone of the original system would be a good idea.

I had the slow TM backup problem, as can be seen in Activity Monitor (AM) by looking at the process "backupd" which had stalled and I could have waited for ever for it to finish.

For the TM problem, three things I can think of:

1.  In Spotlight preferences>Private, exclude all disks/partitions not active.  Wait for Spotlight to complete it's initial indexing.  This is "mdworker" in AM.

2. In the Backup Preferences, exclude all disks/partitions not active as well.

3. I have found with ML that I cannot copy my iPhoto library to an external backup while iPhoto is open.  I would therefore suggest closing iPhoto (and perhaps iTunes) during the backup process, in case they are blocking it.

I hope this helps.

Hello Putnik

very good suggestions indeed, I've applied all reducing the Spotlight and Backup as much as I could, unfortunately this haven't resolved the issue. Just a litlle bit of improvement from 6 days to "about a day" expected completion time.

Trasmission is still bursty and then completely stops for about 3 minutes when "backupd" is 0.03% cpu therefore starving.

I have almost no understanding of MacOS Foundation stack but see attached  "backupd" sample screenshoot when it is starving, where I see that is somewhere attending on socket. Isn't that there is really a policer in TCP stack for this specific traffic?!?! please note that AFP file sharing is very fast on same environment.

I would appreciate an Apple response on this

regards, Tiziano

Hi Tiziano T,  Thanks for your reply, but please note that this is a user to user forum and I certainly am not up to diagnosing specific Console messages

I would suggest you send it, with your thoughts on the matter, to the Apple Support link for Time Machine at:

http://www.apple.com/feedback/timemachine.html

Hi Putnik

thanks for the link, sure I will.

Sorry for the trace picture, although the only scope was to somehow prove that "backupd" seems stucked into a TCP communication part of the stack and  NOT  in waiting filesystems lock release situation which would have resulted from bad interaction with SpotLight indexing or other programs (problem injected since 10.7.5 because was warking perfectly and FAST till 10.7.4).

Certanitly I was not looking for deep debug just sending a screenshot ;-)

thanks again and Best regards

Tiziano

putnik wrote:

 

3. I have found with ML that I cannot copy my iPhoto library to an external backup while iPhoto is open.  I would therefore suggest closing iPhoto (and perhaps iTunes) during the backup process, in case they are blocking it.

 

I think you may have hit something here.  Time Machine used to work in the background but I experience a lot of freezes/kernel panics when playing music from iTunes,  This may be when Time machine has started a backup.  Haven't noticed the same with iPhoto but then we tend to leave iTunes playing music for long periods at a time.

This is a massive problem as Time Machine makes backups every hour - if you can't use iLife programs during a backup...

someone at Apple needs to have their nose rubbed in the mess they've made (and fix it).

Hey, it was only a suggestion to try at this stage.  But I also saw a thread about not being able to share the iPhoto library between two user accounts.  I messed up and had to start my TM backups again.  I closed all other apps and it ran smoothly for a new 50Gb backup set.  Maybe others could try closing the iPhoto app to see if it helps.  I would not want to claim it is a solution at this stage.

Not that this is very much help ... but here we go anyway. My laptop (as opposed to my wifes that had issues last night) had been running just fine. Then it seems to abort the backup with ~60GB to go. Initially it start with the 48 days estimate but now its down to about 6 hours for this remaining 60GB. Ok, as I type this, down to 5 hours for ~60 GB.

I mention this only to further add evidence to the "this is a bug" fire. Now, FF is open, but earlier, I had shut down as much as I could short of killing processes. And it was just sitting on the kitchen counter. Maybe there is other traffic on the network, but stopping completely? and then using network bandwith 'randomly'... something fishy is going on.

If there are straight forward ways to meaure the various through put, please link to some directions. I am fairly technically capable - but no so much on the Mac yet ... so this can be a learning experience for me as well.

Thanks for all intresting reading and all theoris about Time Machine! It has been very educational!

All this actions does speed up Time Machine, but not enough! This is a BUG!

Apple support confirms that this is a BUG in Lion 10.7.5 and MT!

It's know problem and Apple is working on it! All according to Apple Support! (Phone contact)