Heavy load and long time to check for changes

[Anders Wallenquist]

I have been using backintime for some months on a new machine for a home directory with about 15 GB documents, sources, pictures and some video for local increments and versioning. I use deja dup to an external backup-server once a day. In the beginning it was possible to let backintime to make a snapshot every ten minutes (it took just a few seconds). The difference is small, usually there are just a few documents that changes every hour, every snapshot is not more than 20 MB. Now when there are a bunch of snapshots it takes fiften to twenty minutes of heavy load (load average 4 to 6) just to find out if there is any changes.

I think there are a huge performance potential here. Why let rsync check all files everytime instead of act when a change is done? If we use Zeitgeist or the inotify kernel system we can be notified when a file are closed after writing and use a list of changed files for the rsync-work. Normally there is only a handful files that has to be "backintime" every ten minutes and if we let the system tracking the changes when its done there is much less work to be done when backintime does its job.

[Harald Heigl (harald-heigl)]

Hi just reading through the buglist, there is a similar wish to use inotify, so I would say this is a kind of duplicate. Though the wish is more than one year old: https://bugs.launchpad.net/backintime/+bug/455658