<p>I would like to create a copy of a database with approximately 40 InnoDB tables and around 1.5GB of data with mysqldump and MySQL 5.1.</p>

<p>What are the best parameters (ie: --single-transaction) that will result in the quickest dump and load of the data?</p>

<p>As well, when loading the data into the second DB, is it quicker to:</p>

<p>1) pipe the results directly to the second MySQL server instance and use the --compress option</p>

<p>or</p>

<p>2) load it from a text file (ie: mysql &lt; my_sql_dump.sql)</p>

Pipe it directly to another instance, to avoid disk overhead. Don't bother with
```
--compress
```
unless you're running over a slow network, since on a fast LAN or loopback the network overhead doesn't matter.