Replication - speed & catch-up after slave downtime

[SteveMcCartney]

Whilst running a simple two machine Master-Slave replication setup that generates binlogs of 12-40Mb/hour depending on time of day, the slave was required to be taken down for some time. The master is running a real-time system and would preferably not be taken down even for a couple of minutes to take a snapshot and then restarted as instructed in the MySQL manuals....

Is it possible to speed up the replication catch-up process on the slave to re-syncronise with the master (it needs to catch up on 4-5Gb of binlogs)?

Any hints appreciated..