Throttling backups with innobackupex¶
Although innobackupex does not block your database’s operation, any backup can
add load to the system being backed up. On systems that do not have much spare
I/O capacity, it might be helpful to throttle the rate at which innobackupex
reads and writes InnoDB data. You can do this with the
innobackupex --throttle option.
This option is passed directly to xtrabackup binary and only limits the operations on the logs and files of InnoDB tables. It doesn’t have an effect on reading or writing files from tables with other storage engine.
One way of checking the current I/O operations at a system is with
iostat command. See Throttling Backups for details of how
throttling works.
Note
innobackupex --throttle option works only during the backup phase, i.e. it will not work with innobackupex --apply-log and innobackupex --copy-back options.