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Backup Performance Comparison: mysqldump vs MySQL Shell Utilities vs mydumper vs mysqlpump vs XtraBackup

https://www.percona.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/MySQL-Backup-Performance-Comparison.pngMySQL Backup Performance Comparison

MySQL Backup Performance ComparisonIn this blog post, we will compare the performance of performing a backup from a MySQL database using mysqldump, MySQL Shell feature called Instance Dump, mysqlpump, mydumper, and Percona XtraBackup. All these available options are open source and free to use for the entire community.

To start, let’s see the results of the test.

Benchmark Results

The benchmark was run on an m5dn.8xlarge instance, with 128GB RAM, 32 vCPU, and 2xNVMe disks of 600GB (one for backup and the other one for MySQL data). The MySQL version was 8.0.26 and configured with 89Gb of buffer pool, 20Gb of redo log, and a sample database of 177 GB (more details below).

We can observe the results in the chart below:

MySQL Backup Results

And if we analyze the chart only for the multi-threaded options:

multi-threaded options

As we can see, for each software, I’ve run each command three times in order to experiment using 16, 32, and 64 threads. The exception for this is mysqldump, which does not have a parallel option and only runs in a single-threaded mode.

We can observe interesting outcomes:

  1. When using zstd compression, mydumper really shines in terms of performance. This option was added not long ago (MyDumper 0.11.3).
  2. When mydumper is using gzip, MySQL Shell is the fastest backup option.
  3. In 3rd we have Percona XtraBackup.
  4. mysqlpump is the 4th fastest followed closer by mydumper when using gzip.
  5. mysqldump is the classic old-school style to perform dumps and is the slowest of the four tools.
  6. In a server with more CPUs, the potential parallelism increases, giving even more advantage to the tools that can benefit from multiple threads.

Hardware and Software Specs

These are the specs of the benchmark:

  • 32 CPUs
  • 128GB Memory
  • 2x NVMe disks 600 GB
  • Centos 7.9
  • MySQL 8.0.26
  • MySQL shell 8.0.26
  • mydumper 0.11.5 – gzip
  • mydumper 0.11.5 – zstd
  • Xtrabackup 8.0.26

The my.cnf configuration:

[mysqld]
innodb_buffer_pool_size = 89G
innodb_log_file_size = 10G

Performance Test

For the test, I used sysbench to populate MySQL. To load the data, I choose the tpcc method:

$ ./tpcc.lua  --mysql-user=sysbench --mysql-password='sysbench' --mysql-db=percona --time=300 --threads=64 --report-interval=1 --tables=10 --scale=100 --db-driver=mysql prepare

Before starting the comparison, I ran mysqldump once and discarded the results to warm up the cache, otherwise our test would be biased because the first backup would have to fetch data from the disk and not the cache.

With everything set, I started the mysqldump with the following options:

$ time mysqldump --all-databases --max-allowed-packet=4294967295 --single-transaction -R --master-data=2 --flush-logs | gzip > /backup/dump.dmp.gz

For the Shell utility:

$ mysqlsh
MySQL JS > shell.connect('root@localhost:3306');
MySQL localhost:3306 ssl test JS > util.dumpInstance("/backup", {ocimds: true, compatibility: ["strip_restricted_grants","ignore_missing_pks"],threads: 16})

For mydumper:

$ time mydumper  --threads=16  --trx-consistency-only --events --routines --triggers --compress --outputdir /backup/ --logfile /backup/log.out --verbose=2

PS: To use zstd, there are no changes in the command line, but you need to download the zstd binaries.

For mysqlpump:

$ time mysqlpump --default-parallelism=16 --all-databases > backup.out

For xtrabackup:

$ time xtrabackup --backup --parallel=16 --compress --compress-threads=16 --datadir=/mysql_data/ --target-dir=/backup/

Analyzing the Results

And what do the results tell us?

Parallel methods have similar performance throughput. The mydumper tool cut the execution time by 50% when using zstd instead of gzip, so the compression method makes a big difference when using mydumper.

For the util.dumpInstance utility, one advantage is that the tool stores data in both binary and text format and uses zstd compression by default. Like mydumper, it uses multiple files to store the data and has a good compression ratio. 

XtraBackup got third place with a few seconds of difference from MySQL shell. The main advantage of XtraBackup is its flexibility, providing PITR and encryption for example. 

Next, mysqlpump is more efficient than mydumper with gzip, but only by a small margin. Both are logical backup methods and works in the same way. I tested mysqlpump with zstd compression, but the results were the same, hence the reason I didn’t add it to the chart. One possibility is because mysqlpump streams the data to a single file.

Lastly, for mysqldump, we can say that it has the most predictable behavior and has similar execution times with different runs. The lack of parallelism and compression is a disadvantage for mysqldump; however, since it was present in the earliest MySQL versions, based on Percona cases, it is still used as a logical backup method.

Please leave in the comments below what you thought about this blog post, if I missed something, or if it helped you. I will be glad to discuss it!

Useful Resources

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