Strangely long backup time needed

  • Resolved Henk Barreveld

    (@henk-barreveld)


    11 years ago

    Hi,

    Thank you very much for this plugin!!

    I have been using WPB2D a few days now and, even though I didn’t yet try a restore, according to what I find in Dropbox it seems to be working fine.

    However, the backup time seems to be strangely long:

    1st backup: 26 hours (start 2013-04-24 10:01, end 2013-04-25 13:20)
    2nd backup: 6 hours (start 2013-04-26 03:18, end 2013-04-26 09:06)
    3rd backup: 5 hours (start 2013-04-27 03:00, end 2013-03-27 08:25)

    Total files on website: ~250MB, database: ~16MB.

    So the backup time goes down, which makes sense, but is still quite large when there are only very minor changes. For example, the last backup that took 5 hours was only for the sql files (16MB and 4MB), one file added (116kB), a few files deleted.

    Is this normal?

    http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-backup-to-dropbox/

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
  • Plugin Contributor Michael De Wildt

    (@michaeldewildt)

    11 years ago

    Gday Henk,

    The time it takes to backup depends on your sites traffic and your PHP time limit. The first one will always take longer because it has to upload all your files for the first time. Subsequent backups only upload what has changed so they are quicker.

    Hypothetically speaking, lets say you get one visit on the hour every hour and your php time limit is 60 seconds.

    This would mean that the backup will only have 60 seconds to processes as many files as it can before it times out.

    Now because you only get a user every hour, the plugin will have to wait this long before its kicked off again.

    So the time to process the backup is only 5 minutes, but it takes 5 hours due to this issue.

    I have a few ways to solve this issue and need to do some R&D to make it happen.

    Cheers,
    Mikey

    Thread Starter Henk Barreveld

    (@henk-barreveld)

    11 years ago

    Hi Mickey,

    Thank you for your quick reply and your clear description how this works.

    Some support information, focusing on the most recent backup, #4, started today 3:13 and completed 7:15. Only three files, according to the logfile: the usual two sql files and the logfile itself. Some 20MB total. That makes sense; there were no changes yesterday.

    The first message in the logfile after the start is: “Your time limit is 300 seconds and your memory limit is 128M”. At completion it says: “A total of 36MB of memory was used to complete this backup”. So memory is not the problem, I guess and a few times 300 sec. should be enough to transfer the files, right?

    The logfile contains 5x an event, in Dutch, meaning “no backup for a long time, trying to resume”. Interesting enough for each of these events, three identical messages are produced (with the same timestamp).

    After each such event there is a time gap varying from 8 to 30 minutes, after which there is a sequence of Dutch messages “about nn% complete” with about 6 sec intervals, during an exact 90 sec time period. I do not understand how this relates to the 300 sec time limit reported initially.

    By the way, in this log and all previous logs, the last progress message indicates an about 50% completion, one or two seconds later followed by a “finished” message.

    Mickey, I hope some of this may be useful for you. I would have preferred to send you an actual logfile, but I did not find how I can do that.

    One conclusion I made from your information is that, if I want a quicker backup, I should run it at a time that the number of visitors is higher. The number of pageviews per day is average about 500 and always more than a few hundred, but very few during the night. So I have changed the scheduled backup start to 13:00h; let’s see what happens 🙂

    Thanks again,
    Henk

Viewing 2 replies - 1 through 2 (of 2 total)
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