To dump a database to an optimized sql file and then tar/gz compress the file:

> mysqldump --opt database > database.sql
> tar -czvf database.tar.gz database.sql

To export a database from the local mysql server to a remote mysql server:

> mysqldump --opt -A | mysql --user=remote_user --password=remote_pw --host=xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

You're welcome!

Related posts:

1. Automated Backups – A 5 Minute Script To Safer Data
2. Setup Python 2.6.4, mod_wsgi 2.6, and Django 1.1.1 on CentOS 5.3 (cPanel)
3. Ruby On Rails and SliceHost Part 1: Initial Setup

The time intensive code for applications I write generally fall into either data retrieval or data processing. In this particular case the app was spending about 1.5 seconds to retrieve orders that composed a given trade - 1 query per order (p.s. there are 1000's and 1000's of orders).  I re-wrote this portion with 1 query to load into memory all the orders beforehand and cut execution time to 0.11 seconds.

After all is said and done, the page execution time sits at 1.7 seconds. That's an ~80% improvement!

Related posts:

1. PHP Simple Profiling Class
2. PHP fast, large (megabyte), data transfer between sessions
3. Seconds to Minutes/Seconds in Rails