Andy, one reason (in addition to slower clock speeds per core) that a
system with more cores might be slower than an equivalently fast single
processor is memory bandwidth and communications bottlenecks between
cores. Synchronization of multiple database processes and accesses to
shared data a
Daevid, another idea is to consider InnoDB Hot Backup. While it is not
free (perhaps NOT the most important point!), it does have the ability to do
online ("hot" backups) of InnoDB tables while they are being used and
updated. It also backs up MyISAM tables, with a minimal period of time
wh
