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Adam Robinson
Asked: 2011-03-05 05:59:08 +0800 CST

SQL Server 2005 SP3 Express Backups Incredibly Slow

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I'm attempting to troubleshoot an issue with one of our customers who's using SQL Server 2005 SP3 Express to house their application data. The automatic backups that we perform when upgrading our application are timing out after 30 minutes, and I've been sitting and watching the backup take place in SSMS for about 20 minutes now and it's only gotten to 30%.

The database is only slightly over 1GB, so I'm baffled as to what could be causing this sort of horrible performance. The machine is a 1.87GHz Xeon with 3GB of RAM running Windows Server 2003 R2. While that's hardly a powerful box, this seems ridiculous.

Does anyone have any idea why these backups could be taking so long and, more importantly, how I can do something about it?

sql-server sql-server-2005 database-backup

1 Answers

  1. Make sure that you have the backup directory excluded from any anti-virus software running. Monitor the machine for other cpu-hogging or memory-hogging applications, if your memory is overcommitted, that would slow things down. But a backup that size should only take minutes unless there is a hardware problem or seriously slow disks.

    If it is "timing out", what error are you getting?

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