Does creating a database backup on Heroku affect performance?

Heroku has a wonderfully simple backup utility for databases. Obviously, the database will have to do some work to create a back开发者_如何学编程up. What I'm wondering is how much?

If I run this on a production environment with heavy use, are my users going to experience any downtime or slowness? Would there be any harm to running this daily, and how important would it be to do this during non-peak hours?

Hearing about any real-life experiences with this would be wonderful. Cheers!

Because it's simply copying the file, backing up a database usually isn't a very time consuming process and shouldn't lock up your tables. That said, I haven't worked with very large databases (in the gigabytes).

Regardless, I suggest you run it automatically via cron on non-peak hours so you don't have to worry about doing it manually anyways, this gem: https://github.com/joemsak/heroku_backup_task seems to do exactly that.

Hope that helps!