Question

Are there any documented techniques for speeding up mySQL dumps and imports?

This would include my.cnf settings, using ramdisks, etc.

Looking only for documented techniques, preferably with benchmarks showing potential speed-up.

Answer 1

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.