MySQL does not limit the number of slaves that you can connect to the master server in a replication topology. However, as the number of slaves increases, they will have a toll on the master resources because the binary logs will need to be served to different slaves working at different speeds. If the data churn on the master is high, the serving of binary logs alone could saturate the network interface of the master.

A classic solution for this problem is to deploy a binlog server – an intermediate proxy server that sits between the master and its slaves. The binlog server is set up as a slave to the master, and in turn, acts as a master to the original set of slaves. It receives binary log events from the master, does not apply these events, but serves them to all the other slaves. This way, the load on the master is tremendously reduced, and at the same time, the binlog server serves …

In Part I, we introduced a High Availability (HA) framework for MySQL hosting and discussed various components and their functionality. Now in Part II, we will discuss the details of MySQL semisynchronous replication and the related configuration settings that help us ensure redundancy and consistency of the data in our HA setup. Make sure to check back in for Part III where we will review various failure scenarios that could arise and the way the framework responds and recovers from these conditions.

What is MySQL Semisynchronous Replication?

Simply put, in a …