Nick Reinking wrote:
If database dumps are cheap, and can be done "on
the fly" with MySQL, it
might be a reasonable plan to just throw in an extra disk and have it
dump the database every six hours or so.
Running the dump slows things down a lot. Partly because compressing the
dump is expensive, and there's no disk space to keep an uncompressed
dump. Also, unless we lock the wiki the cur and old databases will be
inconsistent in the backup. (Which is in fact the present state of the
backups for the English wiki.)
Those wikis not moved to InnoDB would additionally be unable to edit
during a backup, as writes to the tables are locked while they're being
read.
Of course, a replicated server would be updated in real time at much
lower performance cost.
-- brion vibber (brion @
pobox.com)