I am trying something new. I setup a second MySQL instance on the database server to be a 'slave' and replicate the CKA database. The reason I did this is when ever I do a backup of the CKA database at night it freezes all databases for 30-60 minutes. Those of you who visit the site late at night have probably encountered this.

Now with this replication the live database won't have to be frozen, the backup will take place off the slave database.

   

How does it affect available disk space?

   

CKA supports Slavery? I am aghast!!!

If it makes my time here less interrupted, I support it too!!

   

It will use more than double the disk space, but the database server has 90GB of free space, so no worry there. There might be a bit of disk IO performance hit, but i think its marginal.

   

We did a something similar with Microsoft SQL and monitored the disk queue, there was no appreciable increase in queue length. Anyways, good idea.