  BACKUP performance progressively slowing? 
 The Question is:
 
Over the past few months, our backups have been slowing down to a crawl.
The I/O on the backup drops to the low 30's and backups that normally take 1
hour take 4 hours to complete.  At times the I/O is so slow that the job
will error out.  We have tried
to clean the drive and use new tapes to resolve the problem.  We also
performed an export and import on our database because we thought that the
inex files were causing the problem.  The error count our the tape device
was up to 600 this week.  We seem to
 think that this is a hardware problem but do not know where to start
looking.
 
 
 
 The Answer is:
 
  Without information such as the specific relevent contents of the
  error log and the specific type of tape drive involved, it is
  difficult to answer this question.
 
  This could be a problem with the tape drive or wear on the tape
  media (DDS media is rated for 2000 head passes -- that's passes,
  and each BACKUP can result in multiple head passes), it could be
  a result of excessive fragmentation of the source disk, it could
  be problems with the OpenVMS host configuration such as process
  quotas or pool, or elsewhere.
 
  Please contact the Compaq Customer Support Center.
 
