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.
Brion you mentioned disk space shortage before.
A 120GB Western Digital, IDE, U100, 7200rpm, 8MB cache disk is 135 euro
($ 145) here in Amsterdam. Right now about 15 *un*compressed backups of
all databases could be stored on it. So it will probably solve this
issue for another year. Compressing once a week (as is done now) for
download purposes would suffice.
When there are two hot synched servers one could be brought offline
daily to do the backup. The slower response times during that short
period, if properly announced on the site, are a minor issue compared to
major data loss.
Erik Zachte