Throttling MySQL Enterprise Backup with cgroups

Today I encountered a situation where MySQL Enterprise Backup caused to much load on the I/O subsystem of the server to cause the application to be so slow that it wasn't usable any longer. So I wanted to limit the mysqlbackup process so it wouldn't cause any more issues.

The mysqlbackup command has settings to for the number of read, write and process threads. The defaults are 1 read, 1 write and 6 process threads. So that isn't really useful for throttling as I was using the defaults.

Using the ionice utility wouldn't work as that requires the CFG I/O scheduler.

I found a solution in this blog post. It is to use cgroups on Linux. I had used cgroups before to test how a galera setup works when one of the three servers had a much slower CPU.

# mkdir /cgroup/blkio
# mount -t cgroup -o blkio non /cgroup/blkio
# cgcreate -g blkio:/mysqlbackup
# ls -lh /dev/mapper/vgdb01-lvdb01
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 7 Sep 26 14:22 /dev/mapper/vgdb01-lvdb01 -> ../dm-2
# ls -lh /dev/dm-2
brw-rw---- 1 root disk 253, 2 Sep 26 14:22 /dev/dm-2
# cgset -r blkio.throttle.read_iops_device="253:2 20" mysqlbackup
# cgset -r blkio.throttle.write_iops_device="253:2 20" mysqlbackup
# echo $$ > /cgroup/blkio/mysqlbackup/tasks
# cat /proc/$$/cgroup
1:blkio:/mysqlbackup
# mysqlbackup --user=root --password=xxxxxx --with-timestamp --backup-dir=/data/backup backup

This worked exactly as I had hoped and expected. Both read and write operations were limited to 20 iops.

It turned out to be a issue with the storage system, so I won't have to use this in production but I hope that this will be to value of someone. This can also be useful in other situations.