Improved EBS snapshots on Amazon EC2

So I’ve been working on a system where the MySQL instance on EC2 sporadically locks up (mysqld is zombied) during a snapshot process =)

Essentially the EC2 snapshot is triggered like this:

system("xfs_freeze -f /vol")                        and die;
system("ec2-create-snapshot $vol -K $key -C $crt ") and die;
system("xfs_freeze -u /vol")                        and die;

This method is based on advice from here

Notice I am doing an xfs_freeze of the entire volume on which the mysql data sits. It is intended to be used with volume managers and hardware RAID devices that support the creation of snapshots such as EBS.