The current size of a MySQL 5.1.30 installation is around 420M.
$ du -sh . 426M .
A further breakdown.
$ du -sh * 213M bin 20K COPYING 9.8M docs 8.0K EXCEPTIONS-CLIENT 436K include 12K INSTALL-BINARY 121M lib 504K man 4.0K my.cnf 77M mysql-test 4.0K README 20K scripts 2.3M share 2.9M sql-bench 100K support-files
A means to reduce the footprint by 25% is to delete some unused stuff.
$ rm -rf docs/ mysql-test/ sql-bench/ $ du -sh . 337M .
It’s no big deal, however it certainly does cut down on verbose output in the backup logs removing the mysql-test directory and files.
Nobody reads the docs anyway
Does this mean I can get paid to drink beer and go fishing instead?
Why do you actually care?
Anyone running MySQL in production is likely to have several gigs of data anyway, so 300M of mysql install files is insignificant.
Mark