Hello:

I'm running a small Moodle 2.2.2 installation on a Linux CentOS MySQL 5.5 VPS account to support my own courses and students (5-7 sections for 25 students per section approximately). 

I have MySQL binary logging switched on. My understanding is that binary logging is used by InnoDB for (a) replication to a slave database and (b) enabling InnoDB to recover and restore a database backup to a particular point in time using transaction rollback/forward.

In my circumstances, I am not replicating anything to a slave database nor plan to, and for my purposes a once-a-day mysqldump backup of the database is sufficient. To restore a database I've just been using the ordinary mysql cli command to load the dump into the database. Works fine for me and my needs.

So I'm wondering given my circumstances and needs do I really need mysql to be using binary logging at all? (1) Is binary logging a hit on VPS performance? (2) Would there be any negative effects or risks if I simply turned off binary logging altogether?

Thanks in advance for your thoughts.