# Slave tuning **URL:** \ **Category:** Other MySQL® Questions\ **Created:** [March 27, 2007, 5:55am UTC](https://forums.percona.com/t/slave-tuning/261 "2007-03-27T05:55:52Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 4\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![martin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/73ab20/32.png) [@martin](https://forums.percona.com/u/martin)\ **Post date:** [March 27, 2007, 5:55am UTC](https://forums.percona.com/t/slave-tuning/261/1 "2007-03-27T05:55:52Z")
Hi, I’m using a replication slave for backup purposes, application is not slave aware and can’t be changed easily. The master runs about 60 queries/s, slave is about 3 queries/s. I will usually copy master’s my.cnf and cut down a few vars, max\_connections/mas\_user\_connections to 10, key\_buffer to 32MB, sort/read/query/innodb buffers 2-3x smaller than master. I keep exactly the same innodb log file sizes ) It will usually keep at 0s behind master but this particular server is always behind, it just can’t catch up. It has 2 databases live and staging, 140 InnoDB tables, 2-3 MyISAM (small ones), used for sequence emulation, interprocess communication inside transactions, logs. I’m trying to change vars but with no results so far. Any hints at what should I try next? Master has faster disks. Also in general what config should I use for a slave that’s used only for backup? ---
**Author:** ![sterin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/3ab097/32.png) [@sterin](https://forums.percona.com/u/sterin)\ **Post date:** [March 27, 2007, 12:32pm UTC](https://forums.percona.com/t/slave-tuning/261/2 "2007-03-27T12:32:13Z")
What is the slave doing if you run top or vmstat? Check extremely close that the OS isn’t swapping due to too large memory usage by the software. Disks could be a big problem because the slave is essentially not doing anything else except writing data to disk. All additional indexes can be dumped if this server is only intended for backup purpose. Only keep the primary keys that are used for foreign key constraints and since InnoDB uses them in their internal storage format it isn’t an overhead anyway. Maintaining a lot of indexes that is never going to be used is only going to require unneccessary resources. As for the variables, if you never query this server you will not need any sort\_buffer, key\_buffer, read\_buffer or query\_buffer. But if you are using mainly InnoDB tables you should try to keep the innodb\_buffer\_pool\_size in a relative size. But most of all compare the hardware in the two servers and don’t expect miracles. ---
**Author:** ![martin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/73ab20/32.png) [@martin](https://forums.percona.com/u/martin)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2007, 4:03am UTC](https://forums.percona.com/t/slave-tuning/261/3 "2007-03-29T04:03:02Z")
I think increasing innodb\_buffer\_pool\_size helped, I haven’t got out of sync alerts since increasing it (it’s set to notify me at 600s behind master). I though that this buffer is used mainly for keeping data and keys and it would make sense to keep it high for more SELECTs. FYI I don’t disabled sort\_buffer completely, some subselect based write queries are forced to use dik files in this case and take a lot longer to execute on the slave than the master. I’ve seen this being a problem before and at max\_connections = 10 it won’t use so much RAM. We might also manually run reports on the slave from time to time. ---
**Author:** ![sterin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/3ab097/32.png) [@sterin](https://forums.percona.com/u/sterin)\ **Post date:** [March 29, 2007, 5:37pm UTC](https://forums.percona.com/t/slave-tuning/261/4 "2007-03-29T17:37:55Z")
The thing is that the slave will still check constraints like unique index or foreign keys during inserts/updates. And the only way it can do this is to check the indexes and these indexes are stored in the innodb\_buffer. Writes can also be optimized a lot if the innodb\_buffer\_pool is big since it doesn’t have to flush data so often to disk. And it can also use things like [http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/innodb-insert-bufferi](http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/innodb-insert-bufferi) ng.html To speed up things. So with InnoDB it is always good to keep the innodb\_buffer\_pool\_size at about 80% of the available memory.