Throttling Backups¶
Although xtrabackup 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 xtrabackup reads and
writes data. You can do this with the xtrabackup --throttle
option. This option limits the number of chunks copied per second. The chunk
size is 10 MB.
The image below shows how throttling works when xtrabackup
--throttle
is set to 1.

By default, there is no throttling, and xtrabackup reads and writes data as quickly as it can. If you set too strict of a limit on the IOPS, the backup might be so slow that it will never catch up with the transaction logs that InnoDB is writing, so the backup might never complete.
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