Hi,
importing a 120mb phpbb mysql file.

can't use bigdump as using nginx give 504 timeout errors.

using the following via command line

mysql -uUSERNAME –pPASSWORD DATABASENAME < MYDATABASE.sql
For example, if my username was "silly," my password "computer," my database name "MyDB" and my file name "MyDBBack.sql," I would type:


but it just goes blank and doesnt give me any progress

how can I know when its finished

It's normal that it don't gives you any progress.
You know it's finished when you have a cursor again.
As long as you don't have any errors, then everything is fine.

Normally, a 120 Mb dump should not take more than 3 to 5 minutes, on a decent server.
What you can do if you want to be explicitly told when the restore is finished, you can concatenate a command to be executed just after the import is finished:

mysql -uUSERNAME –pPASSWORD DATABASENAME < MYDATABASE.sql;clear;echo "Import completed";

This will blank the screen, and add an "import completed" message in the terminal.

Might be worth breaking the file up into parts.

Pull all of the table definitions into one file, you should be able to execute that in a few seconds and get everything setup.

Then, split the data into multiple files with an equal number of inserts. If you're lucky each insert will be on a new line making this split as simple as a few head|tail statements.

If you've split the file into 10 equal parts and the first part takes X minutes to finish, you should be able to guage how long the rest of it will take so you can do something else while a script that imports each section sequentially runs.

The script is basically just the same line you've used for each section of the data, then instead of running your line from the terminal you execute your script and walk away.