I’ve faced an issue whive making an SQL import on my Ubuntu Lucid Lynx on my macbook pro 6,2.

To make it working fast you need to disable writing barrier for the ext4 fs :

$ sudo vi /etc/fstab

you’ll see there something like:

/dev/sda3       /   ext4    errors=remount-ro 0 1

Just add there barrier=0 :

/dev/sda3       /               ext4    errors=remount-ro,barrier=0 0       1

and reboot.

After that change my SQL import performed very fast.