MysqlDump working better than XtraBackup??

MySQL & MariaDB Percona XtraBackup
1

Hi,

During Xtrabackup evaluation, I found mysqldump is performing better than Xtrabackup.

Server:
Centos 2.6 in virtualbox over mac 10.6
3 GB ram
4 virtual cpu
percona-xtrabackup.x86_64 2.0.7-552.rhel6
Percona-Server-server-51.x86_64 5.1.68-rel14.6.551.rhel6

Using MysqlDump

total time: 45 minutes
total backup size: 38GB
Command used to take backup:
mysqldump --user=root mydb > /home/mydb.sql

Using XtraBackup

total backup size: 63GB
total time: 53 minutes
Command used to take backup:
innobackupex --user=root /home

No other service was running on system during these tests.

Can somebody explain why MysqlDump performed better? Or I am missing something?

Thanks & Regards,
Atul Atri.

2

It seems disk i/o is a real bottleneck in your backup process since XtraBackup can only copy at 1.2 GB/min (20 MB/s). MySQLdump has the benefit that it doesn’t copy index data and page overhead (this explains the difference between 38GB and 63GB).

This doesn’t mean that MySQLdump is better, since you should also look at restore times.