Big backups can kill a server

So I thought to do a backup of one of my larger forums while I remembered…

A client on the same server called - their site was no longer responding.

I figured it must have been the forum database backup, so I killed the process and everything started to run fine again.

Note to self - only do backups in low-traffic periods. Especially when doing backups of larger forums via Cpanel.

Who would have thought they could create such a big load?

Am now going to have to ensure I do a direct SQL download via SSH.