Why does importing a 12 GB .sql file take more than 36 hours?
Try this:

$ ps -ef|grep [m]ysql


Identify the process id then

$ strace -cp &lt;pid&gt;


Leave it 10 seconds or a minute then ^C. That will tell you where the process is spending its time, e.g. it could just be waiting for the disk if you seen read and write dominate.