Fastest way to do a mysqldump restore on Amazon RDS? We need to restore a database from a 7-Gb mysqldump file to a RDS Amazon instance. 
The full restore takes between 3 and 4 hours (probably because of network latency since the dump has to reside on a EC2), and it's too long for us. For reference, a restore to a local mysqld would take less than 30 minutes.

Is there a Amazon-related solution that would allow us to reduce the import time?

Questions about optimizing a mysqldump restore time have been asked before, such as:


Speeding up mysqldump / reload
MySQL any way to import a huge (32 GB) sql dump faster?
Reasonable times for a mysqldump restore?
MySQL settings useful to speed up a mysqldump import


However, this question is different because relates to a RDS instance, so:


Additional constraints are applied, for instance some MySQL variables (e.g. innodb_doublewrite) cannot be changed to improve performances 
There may be some Amazon-native solution or product that would solve this issue easily and nicely
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.