compess level

Rocco,

The built-in compression in XtraBackup employs the quicklz library which offers a good trade off between compression ratio and speed. I'm not sure what MEB uses for compression, but it's probably either gzip or bzip2, which offer somewhat better compression ratio, but are not multi-threaded and slower. What is the speed difference between XtraBackup and MEB in your case?

Please also note that you only want to use the built-in compression in XtraBackup when you plan to restore (and thus uncompress) individual tables. Otherwise you can use streaming backups in combination with whatever compression utility that fits your needs (qpress, gzip, bzip2, pigz, etc.) Unlike MEB, XtraBackup also supports streaming incremental backups, which makes it possible to use external compression with incremental backups as well.

Thanks for the answer, you are right I missed the concept with streaming backup, I never want to restore just one table. In MEB there are no such options (At least in the quite old version I have).

Speed difference:
MEB 70 minutes.
Xtra 10 minutes :)

Not fair though, same data but different servers, and MEB server are slower, but hey! still good work with Xtra!

Actually we can make the compression level for built-in quicklz compression algorithm tunable. I have created https://blueprints.launchpad.net/percona-xtrabackup/+spec/tunable-quicklz-compression