Master Slave

Master Slave

when in MYSQL is having a Master Slave setup favored?

Just learning about setting up a master slave relationship via mysql. but curious as to what situations it really becomes useful in. like is it only for sites that get a ton of usage and select queries, or does my little app that only my little website use can benefit also from it, or is it not needed for or helpful for small sites?

Replication has advantages in a number of circumstances. For instance, if you need to do a lot of number crunching, you can run a slave that could be used as a data store against which your cpu intensive programs could run, while your main server remains relatively unaffected and able to handle other chores, like serving web pages.

Another thing replication is useful for is having a ready backup in case your primary server goes down.

And for high traffic sites, it is helpful to have multiple slaves behind a load balancer in order to spread the requests out over multiple servers.

However, for a small website, it is probably overkill. I would just make sure I had a backup routine in place so I didn't lose data. Running one server in this situation makes sense.