[ahofmann]

I've used bin log for almost decades and never experienced a big performance impact. This even holds for write heavy MySQL instances in ancient times where servers had spinning disks.

[hobs]

Nonetheless its not a WAL, and if you are not replicating it idk why you'd have it enabled, and if you are replicating you must.

[XCSme]

Thinking back about it, I think the biggest issue was the size, not performance. For a write-intensive app, the bin long quickly got to tens of GBs and filled the entire disk, which was a problem when running the app on smaller VPSs.

[evanelias]

You can tune binlog_expire_logs_seconds to control how long old binlog files stay around. The default is 2592000 seconds (30 days) which is often too long.