SUMMARY
Backup failures may occur as a result of memory issues.
ISSUE
Backup failures may occur as a result of memory issues caused by database processes related to purging aggressively using resources.
RESOLUTION
The issues causing this condition described below are uncommon and usually transient, and should resolve themselves over time, but in some environments additional measures can be taken to mitigate this effect.
A new WaitBetweenPurges master.ini variable is available in 10.1. After you add this new variable, the space_reclaimer service will wait a specified time between spawn sessions to prevent it from being restarted multiple times in rapid succession.
To implement this feature, the appliance must first be upgrades to release 10.1.
After upgrading, run the following command from a putty session logged into the appliance as the root user:
bputil -p StorageManager WaitBetweenPurges 180 /usr/bp/bpinit/master.ini
CAUSE
An issue can occur when a backup appliance has a large number of deleted backups it is attempting to purge in the background. This can occur if a customer manually changes retention policy to cause a large number of backups to be removed, or, in some cases when a unit has not been purging normally due to other issues and those issues are resolved.
When this occurs, processes that calculate free space availablility to process order of backup deletion can be spawned multiple times resulting in resource contention which could result in other processes, commonly backups, not receiving appropriate resources.