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
--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 --throttle
is
set to 1
.

When specified with the --backup
option, this option
limits the number of pairs of read-and-write operations per second that
xtrabackup will perform. If you are creating an incremental backup, then the
limit is the number of read I/O operations per second.
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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