Fastest way to do a mysqldump restore on Amazon RDS?
You must now think in terms of the RDS Instance


Provisoning more IOPs
Is it safe to use innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit = 2


Set innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit = 2
Set sync_binlog=0

Since max_allowed_packet = 1M by default in Amazon RDS, this could cause mysqldump's multirow inserts (extended inserts) could fail. You may want to mysqldump the database with --skip-extended-insert. This will guarantee the data being inserted one-by-one, but the dump will be much larger and take longer to import.


Please read What I learned while migrating a customer MySQL installation to Amazon RDS from Percona's Blog for even deeper insights.