Question

I have a InnoDb table in Mysql that needs to handle insertions very quickly (everything else can be as slow as it wants). The table has no relations or indexes an id which is auto incremented and a time stamp.

I ran a script from multiple clients to insert as many records as possible in the allotted time (loop insert) and calculated the number of insertions per second.

I am only getting on average 200 insertions per second and I need around 20000. The performance doesn’t change with the number of clients running the script or the machine the script is running on.

Is there any way to speed up the performance of these insertions?

—— edit ——–

Thanks for all your help. I couldn’t group any of the insertions together because when we launch all the insertions will be coming from multiple connections. I ended up switching the engine for that table to MyISAM and the insertions per second immediately shot up to 40,000.

Answer 1

First, execute the INSERTs in a TRANSACTION:

START TRANSACTION;

INSERT ...

COMMIT;

Second, batch up multiple rows into a single INSERT statement:

START TRANSACTION;

INSERT INTO table (only,include,fields,that,need,non_default,values) VALUES
(1,1,1,1,1,1,1),
(2,1,1,1,1,1,1),
(3,1,1,1,1,1,1),
...;

COMMIT;

Lastly, you might find LOAD DATA INFILE performs better than INSERT, if the input data is in the proper format.