How to do MySQL replication with 669 Mbit/s over a distance of 226 kilometers

Ever heard that citation attributed to Andrew S. Tanenbaum? "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway."

Picture of me, a truck and a server

Me, a truck and a server

I tried it! Not with tapes, but with a whole server full of data. Today I moved our MySQL replication slave all across Switzerland, from our main office in Zurich to our branch office in Lausanne. We just thought it was not the best idea to have the master and the slave do their work next to each other (for backup reasons). So I took the slave offline this morning and brought it to Lausanne, where (since about two hours) it's already in sync again with the master.

We hired a small truck for this task (actually still too big for this small server, but it was just too heavy to lift, so we needed a tail-lift and that was the smallest car they got at AVIS that had one). The server's equipped with 11 harddrives of 73 GB each (it's actually not all just database, the server will run two other virtual machines in Lausanne). That's a total of 803 GB or 6424 Gigabits. I did the 226 kilometers between the two offices in 2 hours and 40 minutes. That equals to a bandwidth of 669 Mbit/s.

Never underestimate the bandwidth of a replication slave hurtling down the highway!