Albert seems to be connected to the internal network on a 100Mbps link; the backup files are stored on yongle, and accessed over NFS through that link.
Fast, disk-intensive things like making the image tarballs or md5sum'ing the database dumps saturate the line; the apaches have to fight for traffic on that same line trying to load images from albert's NFS server when rendering pages... which leads to waits, hangs, and general suckiness.
If we run the backup process on yongle (or move the actual dump files used?) maybe it'll work better... and/or if that 100Mbps link is supposed to be gigabit, we need to figure out why it's at the wrong speed.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)