Importing the cur and old tables for the English Wikipedia's last backup dump took 2 hours and 45 minutes, at about 20-25% CPU usage. Most of the time spent was waiting on disk output, and most of the CPU that was used was for decompression.
Write speed was around ~15k blocks/sec (1KB blocks -> 15MB/s?)... the InnoDB data store has grown to about 18gb, so a straight write of the data at that rate should have taken about 20 minutes. Clearly it's updating more than it needs to; some tweaking of the MySQL configuration should help streamline this, increasing the buffers and flushing the log less often. It's now on the defaults... I just slapped in a MySQL 4.0.16 Max binary install for AMD64.
(I'm not sure if just copying the datastore files from pliny would work; I have the impression that the on-disk format is platform-dependent, and we've got a 32/64-bit difference here.) Note also that the network seems to be 100-megabit, so a live transfer may be limited by network speed, but that doesn't look like the biggest bottleneck right now.
If I can get PHP up and running I'll try rebuilding the links table and see how long that takes...
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)