My tar command
tar --remove-files -cvif 2011-08-02_14-05-09.tar 2011-08-02_14-05-09
Writes 80MB/s. That's beyond the capacity we can spare because MySQL starts queuing up writes and eventually we get monitoring alerts cause systems won't wait forever on MySQL and time out.
Q: Can I throttle tar to only do 20MB/s?
Didn't find anything in the manpage and we already tried with the lowest ionice class: /usr/bin/ionice -c3 tar <...> but that doesn't impact the MBs written/s and MySQL still freezes up.
Maybe ionice is ignored because we're on a /dev/md0 software RAID device?