May 13, 2015 at 10:27 am
Hello,
I have a recurring issue with 'stalled' backup spids across my estate.
We use symantec netbackup. This is administered by another team who are a little new to the software, as am I.
Periodically, I am seeing backups seemingly stall. I have a job that now runs to capture any spids, with backup cmds that are > 2 hours. (None of our backups should take that long). I am seeing multiple instances of suspended spids that are not blocked but are making no progress. The one I'm looking at now, spid 85, has 3 entries in sysprocesses. The first is suspended waiting on backupthread, the 2nd runnable waiting on misc, the 3rd, suspended waiting on backupio.
This occurs across multiple instances, multiple databases. I can see no discernable pattern.
SQL versions are all SQL 2008, various patches.
No matter how long I leave these processes, they make no further progress, as evidenced by sys.dm_exec_requests, task manager, etc.
Whilst these spids are stalled, no further backups will complete for this databases.
If I kill these, or within task manager, kill the dbbackex.exe process, the next backup due will run and usually complete.
There's nothing in the errorlog, or the windows log that gives me any clues.
I suspect it's a netbackup issue. But, as I'm no expert and the backup team are quite new, it's hard for me to prove & therefore fix this.
Any advice on how to resolve or progress gratefully accepted.
Worst case, I can work around with a kill of backup spids that meet my stalling criteria but it's a pretty crappy resolution.
Thank you.
May 14, 2015 at 5:13 am
what if the question was just ... i have some spids from a 3rd party app that seem 'stalled', forever, until I kill them.
is there anything i can do to troubleshoot within SQL? (other than usual logs?)
May 14, 2015 at 5:24 am
To me that sounds like a bug in the version of NetBackup you are running. I would verify what agent version is running on the server and then check what version your master server is for NetBackup. If you are not running the most current version, upgrade it.
I can only give you my opinion but I would stop using NetBackup to perform SQL Server backups. I implemented this product at multiple clients in years past and tested doing backups and restores, it was not worth the hassle troubleshooting NetBackup. As you have just found out, NetBackup is a beast to troubleshoot just with Windows backups and you add on to that when you try to use it to backup SQL Server. One thing you miss with NetBackup now with 2008 R2 and above is backup compression, which native SQL Server backups can do.
Shawn Melton
Twitter: @wsmelton
Blog: wsmelton.github.com
Github: wsmelton
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