How can I slow down a MySQL dump as to not affect current load on the server?

Question

While doing a MySQL dump is easy enough, I have a live dedicated MySQL server that I am wanting to setup replication on. To do this, I need dumps of the databases to import

Answer 1

Use nice and gzip command to execute the command at lowest priority.

nice -n 10 ionice -c2 -n 7 mysqldump db-name | gzip > db-name.sql.gz