Running the dump slows things down a lot. Partly because compressing the dump is expensive, and there's no disk space to keep an uncompressed dump.
Brion you mentioned disk space shortage before.
A 120GB Western Digital, IDE, U100, 7200rpm, 8MB cache disk is 135 euro ($ 145) here in Amsterdam. Right now about 15 *un*compressed backups of all databases could be stored on it. So it will probably solve this issue for another year. Compressing once a week (as is done now) for download purposes would suffice.
When there are two hot synched servers one could be brought offline daily to do the backup. The slower response times during that short period, if properly announced on the site, are a minor issue compared to major data loss.
Erik Zachte
wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org