mysql is taking too long to insert rows [closed]

Answer 1

In addition to the suggestions @Wouter provided, you should check your indexes. If you are inserting 10k+ rows, you may want to disable keys prior to the insert process. Don't forget to enable keys afterward.

ref. MySql 5.5 Documentation:

This feature can be activated explicitly for a MyISAM table. ALTER TABLE ... DISABLE KEYS tells MySQL to stop updating nonunique indexes. ALTER TABLE ... ENABLE KEYS then should be used to re-create missing indexes. MySQL does this with a special algorithm that is much faster than inserting keys one by one, so disabling keys before performing bulk insert operations should give a considerable speedup. Using ALTER TABLE ... DISABLE KEYS requires the INDEX privilege...

Answer 2

Don't automatically assume that your server settings are wrong. The default settings are probably fine. Inserting 10000 rows should be a piece of cake, even on an old machine, but it depends on how you do your inserts.

Here I'll describe 3 methods for inserting data, ranging from slow to fast:

The following is extremely slow if you have many rows to insert:

INSERT INTO mytable (id,name) VALUES (1,'Wouter');
INSERT INTO mytable (id,name) VALUES (2,'Wouter');
INSERT INTO mytable (id,name) VALUES (3,'Wouter');

This is already a lot faster:

INSERT INTO mytable (id, name) VALUES
  (1, 'Wouter'),
  (2, 'Wouter'),
  (3, 'Wouter');

(Edited wrong syntax)

And this is usually the fastest:

Have CSV file that looks like this:

1,Wouter
2,Wouter
3,Wouter

And then run something like

LOAD DATA FROM INFILE 'c:/temp.csv' INTO TABLE mytable

Which of the above methods do you use?