Connecting: (3)

Sending query to server: (2)

Parsing query: (2)

Inserting row: (1 × size of row)

Inserting indexes: (1 × number of indexes)

Closing: (1)

If you are inserting many rows from the same client at the same time, use INSERT statements with multiple VALUES lists to insert several rows at a time. This is considerably faster (many times faster in some cases) than using separate single-row INSERT statements. If you are adding data to a non-empty table, you can tune the bulk_insert_buffer_size variable to make data insertion even faster. See Section 5.2.2, “Server System Variables”.

If you are inserting a lot of rows from different clients, you can get higher speed by using the INSERT DELAYED statement. See Section 13.2.4.2, “INSERT DELAYED Syntax”.

For a MyISAM table, you can use concurrent inserts to add rows at the same time that SELECT statements are running if there are no deleted rows in middle of the table. See Section 7.3.3, “Concurrent Inserts”.

When loading a table from a text file, use LOAD DATA INFILE. This is usually 20 times faster than using INSERT statements. See Section 13.2.5, “LOAD DATA INFILE Syntax”.

With some extra work, it is possible to make LOAD DATA INFILE run even faster for a MyISAM table when the table has many indexes. Use the following procedure:

Note that LOAD DATA INFILE performs the preceding optimization automatically if the MyISAM table into which you insert data is empty. The main difference is that you can let myisamchk allocate much more temporary memory for the index creation than you might want the server to allocate for index re-creation when it executes the LOAD DATA INFILE statement.

You can also disable or enable the indexes for a MyISAM table by using the following statements rather than myisamchk. If you use these statements, you can skip the FLUSH TABLE operations:

ALTER TABLE tbl_name DISABLE KEYS;
ALTER TABLE tbl_name ENABLE KEYS;

To speed up INSERT operations that are performed with multiple statements, lock your tables:

LOCK TABLES a WRITE;
INSERT INTO a VALUES (1,23),(2,34),(4,33);
INSERT INTO a VALUES (8,26),(6,29);
UNLOCK TABLES;

This benefits performance because the index buffer is flushed to disk only once, after all INSERT statements have completed. Normally, there would be as many index buffer flushes as there are INSERT statements. Explicit locking statements are not needed if you can insert all rows with a single INSERT.

For transactional tables, you should use START TRANSACTION and COMMIT instead of LOCK TABLES to obtain faster insertions.

Locking also lowers the total time for multiple-connection tests, although the maximum wait time for individual connections might go up because they wait for locks. For example:

If you do not use locking, connections 2, 3, and 4 finish before 1 and 5. If you use locking, connections 2, 3, and 4 probably do not finish before 1 or 5, but the total time should be about 40% faster.

INSERT, UPDATE, and DELETE operations are very fast in MySQL, but you can obtain better overall performance by adding locks around everything that does more than about five inserts or updates in a row. If you do very many inserts in a row, you could do a LOCK TABLES followed by an UNLOCK TABLES once in a while (each 1,000 rows or so) to allow other threads access to the table. This would still result in a nice performance gain.

INSERT is still much slower for loading data than LOAD DATA INFILE, even when using the strategies just outlined.

To increase performance for MyISAM tables, for both LOAD DATA INFILE and INSERT, enlarge the key cache by increasing the key_buffer_size system variable. See Section 7.5.2, “Tuning Server Parameters”.