Running netbackup version 7.5 on a solaris system at times has a very long queue time when trying to submit a restore job. The system has a good amount of memory and good CPU’s. Backups seem to work just fine but just getting the restores to enter the active state is crazy. Did some searching and found the article below which helps explain why.

Problem

Restore jobs stay Queued for a long period of time before going Active.

Cause

When a restore job is started, NetBackup must search the backup image(s), to build a list of the files to be restored. The restore job will remain queued while the file list is being built.

If a very large number of files are to be restored, the restore job may stay queued for a long time – a restore job for a few million files will stay in Queued state for several hours before it goes to Active state.
The performance of the master server, and resource contention with other processes, can also affect the time taken to build the file list for the restore.

If the files are being restored to an alternate location, NetBackup must also build a set of directives, to tell the restore job where the files must be restored – this will further increase the time before the job goes active.

Solution

The time taken before a restore job goes active depends mainly on the number of files that are being restored. The larger the number of files to be restored, the longer the job will remain in a Queued state.

The time that a restore job stays queued also depends on the specification of the master server (CPU, memory, and the disk holding the image catalog), and the amount of those resources available to the restore job while it is building the list of files to be restored. If the master server is swapping heavily and/or there are many other jobs running on the master server, this will significantly increase the amount of the time that the job stays in Queued state.

This article was found on: http://www.symantec.com/business/support/index?page=content&id=TECH28521