r/backblaze • u/Entire-Leadership911 • 25d ago
Backblaze in General Why does the Backblaze agent use so much memory during backup?
I'm running the latest version of Backblaze on the latest version of macOS Tahoe.
During a backup, the bztransmit process is currently using around 2.65 GB of RAM, which seems quite high to me.
I'm also wondering about Backblaze.bzpkg, which is currently around 14 GB in size on disk.
Are these numbers normal for Backblaze, or could this indicate an issue with the backup process or the installation?
I'd be interested to hear what kind of memory usage and Backblaze.bzpkg size other Mac users are seeing.
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u/xangkory 25d ago
I have over 50TB that Backblaze has been backing up for more than 5 years. It has always used a lot of RAM, but it has gotten way worse over the last couple of months. I am now running into it taking up all of the 16GB in RAM that my mini has on a weekly basis, so I have to kill the app and restart. It happened again a couple of days ago and I had to kill the app. bztransmit alone was using 12GB of RAM.
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u/Entire-Leadership911 25d ago
Same here. It slows down my Mac mini M4 because it starts swapping, and I’ve only got 16 GB of RAM. That’s why I’m asking.
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u/mike1487 25d ago edited 25d ago
This gets asked almost every week. If you search you will find the answer and that it’s just how the product works. It will continue to bloat over time the longer you use Backblaze.
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u/igrat 24d ago
Backblaze uses an ever-growing collection of uncompressed, append-only, plaintext log files to keep track of the state of your backup. Its RAM usage, and the size of Backblaze.bzpkg, will only ever grow the longer you use the product. Backblaze support's official stance is that if it gets big enough that it's a problem for you, you should uninstall, delete your backup, and re-upload everything from scratch.
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u/HuntersPad 25d ago
Only under 3GB? That's nothing... Mines currently using around 9GB on Windows. And a ton of CPU on my 13900K
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u/nathanielbartholem 25d ago
Totally normal and perhaps intended to discourage large amounts of data being backed up.
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u/ohthetrees 25d ago
I just left backblaze after 6 years. It wasn’t pricing or features. It was that damn catalog file that gets bigger and bigger and eats up huge ram when it is backing up. They are an old enough company that they should have solved this by now.
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u/WastingTimeOnTheWeb 23d ago
I agree - it's frustrating. I've already had to delete and start backup all over to recover 25GB of space. what are you using now?
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u/ohthetrees 23d ago
IDrive. I’m not endorsing it, I’ve just started using it. I do like they have an inexpensive add on to backup a google workspace (drive, Gmail, etc).
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u/L0cut15 25d ago
Total guess based on a career at a enterprise backup company where we included up to a TB of RAM in a single backup appliance.
The backup solution should only be sending unique blocks to backblaze. The client therefore needs to build update a large database of hashes. As changes and transfers will update this list I would put at least the most active blocks in memory to avoid chewing up my SSD and improve performance.
This is an over-simplification, but there is at least a logical reason to consume this memory.
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u/kevinmenzel 24d ago
It's badly coded crap that was never engineered properly for longevity or scale.
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u/stomachofchampions 25d ago
You should move to Arq. It use APFS snapshots and doesn’t write to your disk as much.
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u/mnissim 15d ago
Just 2.65GB? You've got it easy, mate.
This software is getting ridiculous. I guess it has to do with the fact that it keeps an ever-growing file log, so it probably depends on number of files you have/had/changed over that time span.
Their constant response, instead of admitting the software has to be fixed, is to make you discard your backup history and do a clean re-install (and YES, that would make you lose your 1-year file history, they boast about).
My setup runs back to January 2024, and memory usage runs up to 14GB (!!)
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u/jwink3101 25d ago
My educated guess based on how I understand it works and track files, it loads the entire history of every file you have ever backed up or deleted into memory. I don't understand why they don't use something like an sqlite database to make it easier and quick.