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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-05-27T22:56:59+00:00

I setup an EC2 instance with MySQL on EBS volume and setup another instance

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I setup an EC2 instance with MySQL on EBS volume and setup another instance which acts as Slave for Replication. The replication set up was fine. My question is about taking snapshots of these volumes. I noticed that the tables need to be locked for the snapshot process which may cause inconvenience for the users. So, my idea is to leave the Master instance alone and take a snapshot of instance acting as slave. Is this a good idea? Is there anyone out with a similar setup and could guide me in a right way?

Also, taking snapshot of slave instance would require locking of tables. Would that mean replication will break?

Thanks in advance.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Though it’s a good idea to lock the database and freeze the file system when you initiate the snapshot, the actual API call to initiate the snapshot takes a fraction of a second, so your database and file system aren’t locked/frozen for long.

    That said, there are a couple other considerations you did not mention:

    1. When you attempt to create the lock on the database, it might need to wait for other statements to finish before the lock is granted. During this time, your pending lock might further statements to wait until you get and release the lock. This can cause interruptions in the flow of statements on your production database.

    2. After you initiate the creation of the snapshot, your application/database is free to use the file system on the volume, but if you have a lot of writes, you could experience high iowait, sometimes enough to create a noticeable slowdown of your application. The reason for this is that the background snapshot process needs to copy a block to S3 before it will allow a write to that block on the active volume.

    I solve the first issue by requesting a lock and timing out if it is not granted quickly. I then wait a bit and keep retrying until I get the lock. Appropriate timeouts and retry delay may vary for different database loads.

    I solve the second problem by performing the frequent, consistent snapshots on the slave instead of the master, just as you proposed. I still recommend performing occasional snapshots against the master simply to improve its intrinsic durability (a deep EBS property) but those snapshots do not need to be performed with locking or freezing as you aren’t going to use them for backups.

    I also recommend the use of a file system that supports flushing and freezing (XFS). Otherwise, you are snapshotting locked tables in MySQL that might not yet even have all their blocks on the EBS volume yet or other parts of the file system might be modified and inconsistent in the snapshot.

    If you’re interested, I’ve published open source software that performs the best practices I’ve collected related to creating consistent EBS snapshots with MySQL and XFS (both optional).

    http://alestic.com/2009/09/ec2-consistent-snapshot

    To answer your last question, locking tables in the master will not break replication. In my snapshot software I also flush the tables with read lock to make sure that everything is on the disk being snapshotted and I add the keyword “LOCAL” so that the flush is not replicated to any potential slaves.

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