[mcos]

Thanks, I've already tried that. My main issue is EBS performance when writing the dump file to disk. The backups themselves don't impact on database performace much, but writing up to 20 Gigs of a dump file to an EBS disk on a nightly basis is extremely slow. Maybe this Data Pipeline service will help bypass that.

[1SaltwaterC]

Have you tried piping the dump directly to a compression tool? We use pbzip2 for our dumps which works great if you have some CPU power to spare. The largest was around 8 Gigs uncompressed, but the total size of the plain text dumps is over 20 Gigs. Hardly an issue for EBS that way. Did kill the DB for a few minutes several times before using cstream to cap the dump bw.

[jeffbarr]

Have you set up Provisioned IOPS for the volume?