Recently a Vault Collaboration 2013 customer with a combined database and filestore of over 100 GB had noticed that his Vault backup that once took under 2 hours to complete and validate was now lasting nearly ten hours.
He had already used the -DBSC switch in the backup batch file to exclude the standard content libraries for Inventor.
What ultimately worked to drastically reduce the backup duration to around 2 hours again was to adjust the priority of the Windows Task that launched the backup script using the details in Chris Turner's Cadline Community Blog in the UK.
From Microsoft's MSDN Article, here are the available levels of task priority from highest, 0 to lowest, 10. Autodesk recommends a Normal priority class setting of 4, 5 or 6. For Windows Server 2008, the default value is 7, which is below normal priority.
| Task priority | Priority Class | Priority Level |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | REALTIME_PRIORITY_CLASS | THREAD_PRIORITY_TIME_CRITICAL |
| 1 | HIGH_PRIORITY_CLASS | THREAD_PRIORITY_HIGHEST |
| 2 | ABOVE_NORMAL_PRIORITY_CLASS | THREAD_PRIORITY_ABOVE_NORMAL |
| 3 | ABOVE_NORMAL_PRIORITY_CLASS | THREAD_PRIORITY_ABOVE_NORMAL |
| 4 | NORMAL_PRIORITY_CLASS | THREAD_PRIORITY_NORMAL |
| 5 | NORMAL_PRIORITY_CLASS | THREAD_PRIORITY_NORMAL |
| 6 | NORMAL_PRIORITY_CLASS | THREAD_PRIORITY_NORMAL |
| 7 | BELOW_NORMAL_PRIORITY_CLASS | THREAD_PRIORITY_BELOW_NORMAL |
| 8 | BELOW_NORMAL_PRIORITY_CLASS | THREAD_PRIORITY_BELOW_NORMAL |
| 9 | IDLE_PRIORITY_CLASS | THREAD_PRIORITY_LOWEST |
| 10 | IDLE_PRIORITY_CLASS | THREAD_PRIORITY_IDLE |
The method to adjust the priority for the scheduled backup is to export in the Windows Task Scheduler, the backup task to an XML file that will be named the same as the task's name.
Then open the XML file in Notepad and locate <Priority>7</Priority> near the bottom of the file. Change the 7 to 4, 5 or 6, as Autodesk recommends, then save the file.
Then, back in the Task Manager, delete the existing task and from the right side locate and load the revised XML file from Import task.
For larger filestores, that should noticeably reduce the over all time for backup and validation. Please use your own discretion if you want to try a higher priority than the 4 that Autodesk recommends. It would be best to test and confirm that the backup is complete as well.
For more information, please see Autodesk's Cracking the Vault blog article Improving Time to perform a Vault Server Backup.
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