Speeding up mysql dumps and imports

1. Get a copy of High Performance MySQL. Great book.
2. Extended inserts in dumps
3. Dump with --tab format so you can use mysqlimport, which is faster than mysql < dumpfile
4. Import with multiple threads, one for each table.
5. Use a different database engine if possible. importing into a heavily transactional engine like innodb is awfully slow. Inserting into a non-transactional engine like MyISAM is much much faster.
6. Look at the table compare script in the Maakit toolkit and see if you can update your tables rather than dumping them and importing them. But you're probably talking about backups/restores.

http://www.maatkit.org/ has a mk-parallel-dump and mk-parallel-restore

If you’ve been wishing for multi-threaded mysqldump, wish no more. This tool dumps MySQL tables in parallel. It is a much smarter mysqldump that can either act as a wrapper for mysqldump (with sensible default behavior) or as a wrapper around SELECT INTO OUTFILE. It is designed for high-performance applications on very large data sizes, where speed matters a lot. It takes advantage of multiple CPUs and disks to dump your data much faster.

There are also various potential options in mysqldump such as not making indexes while the dump is being imported - but instead doing them en-mass on the completion.

If you are importing to InnoDB the single most effective thing you can do is to put

innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit = 2

in your my.cnf, temporarily while the import is running. You can put it back to 1 if you need ACID.

Make sure you are using the --opt option to mysqldump when dumping. This will use bulk insert syntax, delay key updates, etc...

If you are ONLY using MyISAM tables, you can safely copy them by stopping the server, copying them to a stopped server, and starting that.

If you don't want to stop the origin server, you can follow this:

1. Get a read lock on all tables
2. Flush all tables
3. Copy the files
4. Unlock the tables

But I'm pretty sure your copy-to server needs to be stopped when you put them in place.

Using extended inserts in dumps should make imports faster.

turn off foreign key checks and turn on auto-commit.

There is an method for using LVM snapshots for backup and restore that might be an interesting option for you.

Instead of doing a mysqldump, consider using LVM to take snapshots of your MySQL data directories. Using LVM snapshots allow you to have nearly real time backup capability, support for all storage engines, and incredibly fast recovery. To quote from the link below,

"Recovery time is as fast as putting data back and standard MySQL crash recovery, and it can be reduced even further."

http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/2006/08/21/using-lvm-for-mysql-backup-and-replication-setup/