Problem backing up/streaming 2000+ databases, waiting for global read lock

Happy New Year everyone,

I’m hoping someone can help me out. I’m trying to use Xtrabackup to stream about 2500 production databases from the server to a backup storage server (i.e. not a MySQL server, just storage). We’ve been doing this for a while using NFS and it’s no longer a viable solution because of the write speed to NFS and the load NFS imposses on the system. So I’m attempting to switch from using xtrabackup_56 directly to innobackupex and streaming with xbstream to my storage server.

On my development box it works great. On production, not so much. After a few hours of running MySQL stops accepting connections and when I do a processlist on it every query is in a state of “Waiting for global read lock” adn the process that I think is from xtrabackup is in a sleep state. Any suggestions on fixing this? From what I’ve read I’m thinking that --lock-wait-quiry-type=update would be the way to go? If I kill off the root process that’s sleeping in MySQL, things are all good again. Any thoughts? I’m running xtrabackup 2.1.9 (yes, I need to upgrade it, but I can’t right now unless it’s absolutely required).

this is the xtrabackup command that’s running on the system.

xtrabackup_56 --defaults-group=mysqld --backup --suspend-at-end --target-dir=/tmp --tmpdir=/tmp --throttle=16 --parallel=4 --stream=xbstream

Thanks
Chad