Using symbolic links for MySQL data files

Over a year ago, we had several servers configured for high traffic websites. A mispartioning resulted in /var becoming obscenely small, and it was only after MySQL crashed that we remembered this. We couldn’t afford more downtime if we dealt with the partition size problem, so I thought of quickly moving the data files into /home/mysql/{dbname} from /var/lib/mysql/{dbname} and create the symlink /var/lib/mysql/{dbname} -> /home/mysql/{dbname}.

I was not certain of the performance implications to this. I heard from a fellow Linux junkie here that there may be a slight penalties in terms of access speed, since /home was meant for generic read/write, whereas /var was accessed in a very quick manner. Gotta verify this. But for now, I dwell in the power of symbolic links.

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