MySQL replication: most important config parameters for performance on slave server? I'm setting up a mysql master-slave configuration, where slave is located on a much weaker sever. 

Since, if I understand correctly, slave only works on updates/inserts, what are the most critical configuration parameters that I can adjust in slave's my.cnf to ensure best performance and smallest possible latency? 


Master: 32Gb RAM, Slave: 4Gb RAM
Mostly innodb tables
Percona-server 5.5 on both master and slave
If your concern is about performance and you don't care about losing a small chunck of data(usually 1 second) in case of server crashes, I would change the follow variables:


innodb_buffer_pool_size - try to use 80% of your total ram (in this case 3.2Gb)
innodb_log_file_size - chose a good value in here to optimize the i/o in your slave
innodb_flush_log_at_trx_commit - set it to 2 or 0
innodb_doublewrite - disable innodb doublewrite
innodb_flush_method - change the flush method to O_DIRECT
sync_binlog - if you have binary log enable on slave, disable sync_binlog
make sure you have sync slave variables disabled sync_master_info sync_relay_log and sync_relay_log_info


A good option is to read this article, it's a general overview to how optimize innodb, it will work for your master and also to your slave.

If you are planning to upgrade to the percona server which implement features from MySQL 5.6, I would recommend that you increase the number of slave sql threads slave-parallel-workers