Improving the speed of database backups
You can use multiple, concurrent data streams for database backups, which reduce the time that is required for a backup or restore operation to complete.
About this task
The amount of time that you can save depends on the size of the database. In general, the best performance benefits occur when you update your configuration from one to two streams and when the database is more than 100 GB.
A potential disadvantage when you use multistream processing is that more volumes and drives are required than for single-stream processing. For example, if the backup of an 850 GB database requires a single Linear Tape-Open (LTO) volume, switching to four data streams requires four drives. Volumes might be partially filled, especially if you use high-capacity volumes and device compression. If a backup of the database uses only 30% of a tape volume after compression, then four-stream processing results in even larger amounts of wasted space.
In some cases, particularly on AIX®, problems with the TCP loopback interface can cause database backups to be unacceptably slow. Try configuring shared memory for database backups to see whether the speed of the database backup improves.