Benchmark xtrabackup streaming option tar.gz vs. tar

time innobackupex –databases=”mydb” –stream=tar ./ –slave-info > /var/lib/mysql/snapshot_mydb.tar

time innobackupex –databases=”mydb” –stream=tar ./ –slave-info | gzip – > /var/lib/mysql/snapshot_mydb.tar.gz

Results:
TAR: filesize 5.4Gb
real 0m52.633s
user 0m0.900s
sys 0m29.860s

TAR.GZ: filesize 350Mb
real 2m26.606s
user 3m40.261s
sys 0m28.829s

And during the dump, tar.gz locks tables. Thus, for a big database, a better solution would be just tar, then compress before sending