I would say that the biggest risk with mysqldump is restore time. If a significant portion of the buffer pool is in memory, it may actually dump quite fast. M

I would say that the biggest risk with mysqldump is restore time. If a significant portion of the buffer pool is in memory, it may actually dump quite fast. MySQL 5.5 and above also have a modified LRU algorithm so that tablescans (i.e. mysqldump) can only evict up to 3/8ths of the cache contents.