Trying to restore mysqldump of forum DB causes server load to go crazy - what to do?
 

I'm in the process of transferring a forum from one server to another. I originally tried restoring a cpmove* but that failed because after a while the server load spiked so high that the server became unresponsive and needed a reboot. So I did backed up the home directory and DB separately* dumping the DB to a file and then running the file from command line ('nice mysql ... < dump.sql' - tried with and without nice) - but restoring the DB once again caused the load to go haywire.

So now I'm trying to restore the DB in 3 parts - every table except for postindex and post* then postindex* then post. Those two tables are gigs in size. However the same thing happens when trying to restore the two big tables - load eventually goes nuts* crashing all sites on the server.

What can I do to successfully restore the database without these load issues that wreck the server?