Bitbucket Backup Client Performance

Vitalii Djiguir

Hello, 

We have been running Stash and then Bitbucket server for some time now. It is running on a dedicated Windows VM and external MSSQL DB in Azure. Backup client is scheduled to run every night at 2 am which might be an overkill. The total backup size is just over 2GB and it takes just over 2 hours. We are about to migrate a lot more code onto this server and I am a bit concerned with amount time it would take to perform a backup.

So, I started to look at some statistics from Atlassian and found this article: https://confluence.atlassian.com/bitbucketserver/using-the-bitbucket-server-backup-client-776640064.html#UsingtheBitbucketServerBackupClient-Howitworks

In the last paragraph of How It Works section it states:

"As an indication of the unavailability time that can be expected when using the Bitbucket Server Backup Client, in our testing and internal use we have seen downtimes for Bitbucket Server of 7–8 minutes with repositories totalling 6 GB in size. For comparison, using Bitbucket Server DIY Backup for the same repositories typically results in a downtime of less than a minute."

According to Backup logs it takes about 6-7 minutes to get to the following line which gets logged for the next hour:

2016-05-28 02:07:08,024 INFO  [main] c.a.b.i.b.c.l.DefaultApplicationHome Verifying Bitbucket home

and then the following line is logged for another hour:

2016-05-28 03:09:34,011 INFO  [main] c.a.b.i.b.c.l.DefaultApplicationHome Backing up Bitbucket home

Can someone explain what are we doing wrong and why it would take that long to backup our server?

 

ThiagoBomfim

Hi Vitalii,

If your backup client is already taking 2 hours and you are going to migrate more code into Bitbucket/Stash, we would recommend you to look into:

• Using Bitbucket Server DIY Backup

As we describe on the page:

The key to reducing downtime is the use of optimal, vendor-specific database and file system backup tools. Such tools are generally able to take snapshots (though sometimes in a vendor-specific format) in much less time than the generic, vendor-neutral format used by the Bitbucket Server Backup Client.

So the scripts have been developed aiming help customers that were struggling with the Backup client. I know you're running on Windows and the current scripts should be able to function for you if you install Cygwin.

This approach (with small modifications) can be used for running DIY Backups on:

• Linux and Unix
• OSX
• Windows with cygwin (note that cygwin Git is not supported by Bitbucket Server).

Let us know if that helps.

Thiago