I received my My Book Live from Amazon on Friday so I’ve spent most of the weekend playing with it backup up my systems – I have a couple Macbook Pros and a Windows desktop to back up along with a smallish media library I’ll stream to my TV using a WD media player. Fairly simple setup.
But, backups have seemed to be painfully slow - I’m not backing up over wifi - I was to the point of getting perhaps < 1MB/s on a 40G backup. So, I enabled ssh and started poking around – the sleep mode monitoring service was competing with the smbd process for the disk – and being that this thing only has 256MB of RAM, having twonky and all these other services running along with the HUGE apache/php footprint, I think the system is just starved for memory. Disabling twonky and sleep mode (manually killing the monitorio.sh process) and stopping apache and nfs (not using nfs anyway) really seems to have made a big difference.
The backup I’m running from my Macbook Pro now seems to be going pretty well getting 10-20MB/s (note I’m going through a 10/100 switch in this room, so plugging into the GigE switch the NAS is plugged into might make it go even faster).
So my feedback is that some optimizations could be made in the firmware to give more free memory to the kernel to deal with the huge drives in these things – the apache stack could perhaps be replaced with nginx, and there should be a way to disable nfs in the UI (is there already?), and there should be a better way to sleep the disk than crawling the whole filesystem…
Matt
