Mysqldump from the Amazon RDS I have a Mysql database deployed on Amazon web services RDS. I am running a crontab which runs mysqldump command. The problem is it freezes the rds instance and my website will be down for more then half and hour almost. It will be inaccessible. Is there any way to stop the freeze during the dump and website will be accessible during the dump also.
Have you tried mysqldump using --single-transaction ? In this way it doesn't lock the table for threads doing SQL,DML operations provided no DDL statements should be issued and you will get the backups for conistent states only. This will be efficient  only for innodb tables. Below url might give some insights about the option.

http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.1/en/mysqldump.html#option_mysqldump_single-transaction