How to check if the hardware performance is sufficient for the recovery / backup?

At the online-backup or the recovery (in redundant systems) for the database several files will be copied from the local database to the destination directory.
If the performance of the hardware is not sufficient this process can take very long. Therefore you should make some checks for the hardware used at the WinCC OA project.

If the required performance is not reached please check the hardware settings for the hard-discs, the RAID-system (if installed and used) and the network.
The tests have to be done when WinCC OA is stopped to avoid access problems when using files from the db-directory for the tests.

-- Check for the online backup (applicable in all systems)

To check the performance in that case copy a few huge files (500 – 1000MB) from the db-directory of the WinCC OA project to the destination folder for the backup and check which transfer rate (MB per second) is reached.

In a standard system a rate of 50-100 MB/sec should be possible.

-- Check for the database recovery (necessary only in redundant systems)

In a redundant system a md5-checksum is generated and files are copied during the recovery.

To check the performance for calculating the md5 checksum install a freeware md5-tool at your system.
Afterwards start the program and let it determine the md5 checksum for some (huge) files at the db-directory, e.g. a file from the value-archive-directory.
Calculating the md5 checksum should take 1-3 seconds/100 MB.

For the copy process you can check the performance by copying huge db-files from the project-db-directory at server1 to server2 and vice versa.

In a standard system a rate of 50-100 MB/sec should be possible for copying files.