Using Diagnostic Support Tools - HP MSL6000 Series User Manual

Table 11 Troubleshooting General Problems (continued)
Problem
Library Performance
HP-UX host responds slowly, or crashes
after connecting to the library.
The library is not efficiently backing up
data.

Using Diagnostic Support Tools

This section describes diagnostic tools available to help troubleshoot and maintain your tape library.
140 Troubleshooting
Solution
• Check the SCSI IDs of all devices on the host busses
to ensure there are no conflicts.
• Check that the application software does not require
SCSI IDs to be in a certain order.
• Contact your authorized service provider.
• Check the network bandwidth from the target to the
host computer.
• Check that the library's drives are on their own SCSI
bus, and not daisy-chained to another tape drive,
hard drive, or other high bandwidth device.
• Check that the server and file system have the
processing power and memory needed to stream the
tape drive.
• Ensure that other applications are not taking up
bandwidth from the backup server or target
workstations.
• Ensure the server has a fast enough file system (i.e.
RAID).
• Ensure that the drive is clean.
• Try a new tape. A marginal tape can cause
performance problems due to bad spots on the tape,
requiring retries.
• Ensure that the application software is using
fixed-length records (or blocks) to maximize
throughput, and has not defaulted to a smaller
record size. (64K should be sufficient.)
• Ensure that the data is being compressed, however
do not turn on both software and hardware
compression. (In most cases, hardware compression
should be enabled.)
• Check the size of the files. Backing up several small
files can impact performance.