MySQL Cluster Bandwidth Relief

I have been toying with having offsite backups for our MySQL databases -  The idea is – all data could be offsite in case of a major fire or another issue.

I setup a radio link between our new office and our old using a Ubiquity NanoStation – and the bandwidth is Awesome – however… so is the amount of informaiton.

MySQL replication however – as its nature is – any Insert, Update, or Delete statements are written to the binary log, then sent from the master server in the datacenter to our new office.

I have been running this setup now for a short time – however I noticed today – that the slave server has been crawling – and unable to keep up.  So – in hunting – I cound that there is a sizable amount of bandwidth flowing between the two – not counting the other file backups going over the same link.

It seems that there is not enough bandwidth over this radio link to keep up with the replication… After a bit of hunting -  I found the slave_compressed_protocol setting in MySQL which allows the master and slave to compress the replication data between the two servers exists..  After enabling that, the slave was able to catch up within a matter of minutes and has stayed caught up just fine. The bandwidth usage has dropped a huge amount.    Next is coming the SSH compression – and I think the logs – which go through the SSH tunnel will most likely have similar success.