Question

I am suffering from abysmal INSERT times on my MacPro (quad-core 6G memory) running mysql 5.1.49 on snow leopard 10.6.4. I tried to figure out where the problem is and finally came to the conclusion that it must have to do with Mac OS X.

Here is the test I ran. I have an old dell with a single pentium cpu and 256M memory and mysql 5.1.44. The ip2nation.sql file contains distinct insert lines like this

INSERT INTO ip2nation (ip, country) VALUES(0, 'us');
INSERT INTO ip2nation (ip, country) VALUES(687865856, 'za')
...

Inserting those over the network works pretty well

time mysql -h dell test < ip2nation.sql

real    0m22.352s
user    0m0.587s
sys     0m1.556s

running the same test against my mysql database on my mac and the result is mind boggling

time mysql test < ip2nation.sql 

real    23m46.254s
user    0m1.199s
sys     0m1.808s

Both commands are run from OSX. When I change the format of the SQL INSERT statements to

INSERT INTO ip2nation (ip, country) VALUES
(0, 'us')
,(687865856, 'za')
...

times on OSX were a lot better

time mysql test < ip2nation.sql 

real    0m1.183s
user    0m0.021s
sys     0m0.009s

Can anybody explain this to me? I can’t rewrite all my applications to use this form of INSERT statement.

Answer 1

The solution to my problem was the config in /etc/my.cnf

sync_binlog=1

I have no idea how it got there, but taking it out or setting it sync_binlog=0 certainly helped.