percona xtrabackup unreachable while backup

Have used xtrabackup for a couple of years and the web application has always continued to run smoothless while backup. But in the recent months I experience that my web application is out of reach in the 3-4 minutes it takes to complete the backup procedure…

Isn’t xtrabackup meant to run in a production environment even when the server is public?

innobackupex version 2.4.12 Linux (x86_64) (revision id: 170eb8c)

My database it not that big… ~160 tables and under 2GB data in total

Syntax:
‘innobackupex --defaults-file=’.self::MY_CNF.’ --user=‘.$mysql_user.’ --password=‘.$mysql_pass.’ --databases=“‘.$mysql_db.’ mysql” --no-timestamp --stream=tar ./ 2> ‘.$tmp_log.’ 1> /path/to/backup-file.tar’