how to calculate a proper log file size

[Lenny_Andersen]

Hi,

I’m creating a backup plan for my MySQL Server (5.5). I was thinking about a full backup every sunday morning and an incremental backup monday - saturday.
I figured that innobackupex pretty much will do the trick for me.

So far so good.

I was reading about how the backup is done, and I understand that the incremental backup is done by reading the changes in the logfile since last backup (Based on the LSN).

What happens if my logfile is i.e. 5 MB but in the time between two backups there is written 20 MB to the log.

I guess I won’t be able to create a valid incremental backup since 15MB of information must be missing in the log?
and I also guess I will have to increase the log file size to fix this problem?

But how do I calculate a proper size for the logfile?

any “best practices” on this matter?

[miguelangelnieto]

The incremental backup is not taken reading the redo log file. What Xtrabackup does is the following:

• When a full backup is taken, it writes the last LSN (log sequence number) copied on that backup to a file. Let’s say it is 500.
• When you take an incremental, xtrabackup reads that file and checks that the incremental should continue on LSN 500… Then, it scans InnoDB data and copies all pages with a LSN greater than 500.

So, for incremental backups the redo log size is not important. Maybe you read something about log archiving feature in Percona Server, but that’s a different way to do the backups.

Anyway, having a proper size of the logfile is good for overall performance, so check this blog post to learn how to calculate it:

http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2008/11/21/how-to-calculate-a-good-innodb-log-file-size/

[Lenny_Andersen]

Thanks for the answer and the link. Very helpful