Performance issues observed when running UltraSPARC T-series or SPARC T3 and T4 architecture as a NetBackup 7.x and 8.x Master Server

Problem

Issues have been reported when using UltraSPARC T-series or SPARC T3 / T4 architecture as a NetBackup Master Server in large environments.

Error Message

Performance issues include:

- no response from SLP requests (nbstlutil stops responding)

- delays accessing database contents

- delays with catalog verify/validate queries

This occurs when pending database queries take longer than CORBA timeout values.  Additional issues have been reported as well.

Solution

If a Master Server running on UltraSPARC T-series or SPARC T3 / T4 hardware is unable to keep up with database transactions, support may be able to improve system performance to a limited degree.  Permanently resolving this requires upgrading to SPARC T5 or later, or moving to a different CPU architecture.

SPARC T4 hardware is shown to mitigate these issues to a better degree than other T-series processors and decrease the delay in response, however in heavy workload environments the issue will still present.

Customers are encouraged to test NetBackup performance on this architecture prior to production deployment.

This document supersedes the comment in the NetBackup Release Notes for 7.1, 7.5, 7.6 and  7.6.1 (see Related Articles)

Applies To

This has been observed on SPARC T3 (Niagara 3) and previous UltraSPARC T builds. Third party benchmarks indicate that is not an issue with SPARC T5 and later architectures.