Heavy Server Load on Backup

Hello folks. I run backups twice a day which are sent via SCP to another server. One of the archives created is about 1GB in size and during this process the server load is really very high.

Below are the server specs:
InterWorx-CP Version: InterWorx-CP v3.0.1 [Unlimited Domain]
SiteWorx Accounts: 8 / Unlimited Used
Distribution: Fedora Core release 4 (Stentz)
Operating System: Linux 2.6.17-1.2142_FC4smp (SMP) CPU: [2x] 3000.19Mhz Intel® Xeon™ CPU 3.00GHz (2048 KB Cache)
System Memory: 1010.32 MB
System Uptime: 39 days 7 hours 57 minutes
Load Average: 4.66 4.34 3.21

Is there anything that can be done to make the gzip process use less resources? Any other ideas?

Try using the --compression parameter:

Cool thanks. I’ve set it to have th parameter.

–compression=9

Will see how it goes.

Actually, you should set it to -1 for the fastest (less) compression. I’ll be sure to update the docs to make it clearer in the future. From the gzip man page:

Regulate the speed of compression using the specified digit #, where -1 indicates the fastest compression method (less compression) and -9 indicates the slowest compression method (best compression). The default compression level is -6 (that is, biased towards high compression at expense of speed).

Ah ok thanks. :slight_smile: