Do you put the whole DB at risk by enabling transaction log flush delay - e.g set innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit to 0?

The answer to your question is right here, as per documentation for 5.5: For ACID compliance the default value since 4.1 is 1: http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/innodb-parameters.html#sysvar_innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit If the value of http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/innodb-parameters.html#sysvar_innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit is 0, the log buffer is written out to the log file once per second and the flush to disk operation is performed on the log file, but nothing is done at a transaction commit. When the value is 1 (the default), the log buffer is written out to the log file at each transaction commit and the flush to disk operation is performed on the log file. When the value is 2, the log buffer is written out to the file at each commit, but the flush to disk operation is not performed on it. However, the flushing on the log file takes place once per second also when the value is 2. Note that the once-per-second flushing is not 100% guaranteed to happen every second, due to process scheduling issues. The default value of 1 is required for full ACID compliance. You can achieve better performance by setting the value different from 1, but then you can lose up to one second worth of transactions in a crash. With a value of 0, any http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/mysqld.html process crash can erase the last second of transactions. With a value of 2, only an operating system crash or a power outage can erase the last second of transactions. InnoDB's http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/glossary.html#glos_crash_recovery works regardless of the value. For the greatest possible durability and consistency in a replication setup using InnoDB with transactions, useinnodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit=1 and sync_binlog=1 in your master server my.cnf file. Caution Many operating systems and some disk hardware fool the flush-to-disk operation. They may tell http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.5/en/mysqld.html that the flush has taken place, even though it has not. Then the durability of transactions is not guaranteed even with the setting 1, and in the worst case a power outage can even corrupt the InnoDB database. Using a battery-backed disk cache in the SCSI disk controller or in the disk itself speeds up file flushes, and makes the operation safer. You can also try using the Unix command hdparm to disable the caching of disk writes in hardware caches, or use some other command specific to the hardware vendor.