[Discussion] How to reduce Load from Time Machine use?

[ShoutingMan]

F4-425 with factory 4GB RAM

Running Time Machine with Debug mode on takes Load to 100%, slowing down everything else, particularly Emby.
Time Machine with Debug Mode turned off, Load is 70% to 85%.

I have two computers running Time Machine hourly, so the NAS is running high Load often.

Would any hardware upgrades reduce Load from TimeMachine use? Adding RAM? Adding an SSD drive? My Macs have 1Gb ports, so upgrading my network to 2.5Gbps doesn’t seem practical, but I could potentially do that.

Thanks for any tips / tricks.

[CursaYang]

The load on TOS is determined by several factors, including CPU and memory usage, as well as disk I/O and network bandwidth. You can check in System Information to see which one has reached its bottleneck.

If you need to run Time Machine and Emby at the same time, 4GB of memory may not be enough. The F4-425 supports up to 16GB of memory, so you can upgrade to a larger memory module.

[ShoutingMan]

The load on TOS is determined by several factors, including CPU and memory usage, as well as disk I/O and network bandwidth. You can check in System Information to see which one has reached its bottleneck.

If you need to run Time Machine and Emby at the same time, 4GB of memory may not be enough. The F4-425 supports up to 16GB of memory, so you can upgrade to a larger memory module.

When Load is 100% (when TimeMachine is running), CPU is ~5%, Memory is ~30%, LAN is ~1MB/s, and Disk is ~3MB/s. No individual parameter is high. But Load is max’d and the system is sluggish. I’m unclear what the bottleneck is.

I can buy a stick of 16GB RAM if that will help. [EDIT: RAM is $120, which I can take a chance on, maybe after the holidays.]

[TMzethar]

Have you started any Docker containers? Due to standard statistical criteria, their load may not be included in TOS statistics.
Disk I/O does not necessarily reach speeds of 100+ MB/s; if there are a large number of small files, this can also cause Disk I/O to spike. You can use the command `iostat 1` to observe the actual Disk I/O activity.

[ShoutingMan]

Have you started any Docker containers? Due to standard statistical criteria, their load may not be included in TOS statistics.
Disk I/O does not necessarily reach speeds of 100+ MB/s; if there are a large number of small files, this can also cause Disk I/O to spike. You can use the command `iostat 1` to observe the actual Disk I/O activity.

I have Docker installed and a few Docker apps. I thought they were disabled — I don’t need them running normally. I just disabled Docker and container apps. Did the the same for PHP.

Will see if that makes a difference.