Comments on: MySQL InnoDb inserts are slow, really slow!

By: Ajay Divakaran

Ajay Divakaran — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 12:10:55 +0000

Chris,
InnoDB is a pretty good engine. However, it highly relies on being ‘tuned’. One thing is that if your inserts are not in the order of increasing primary keys, innoDB can take a bit longer than MyISAM. This can easily be overcome by setting a higher innodb_buffer_pool_size. My suggestion is to set it at 60-70% of your total RAM.
I am running 4 such servers in production now, inserting about 3.5 million rows a minute. They already have close to 3 Terabytes. InnoDB it had to be , because of the highly concurrent inserts.
There are further ways to speed up inserts. And I’ve benchmarked some.

By: chris

chris — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 19:52:18 +0000

Good to know Nick, thanks for the contribution. Makes sense after reading http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/commit.html.

By: Nick

Nick — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 18:45:12 +0000

I found that if I set AutoCommit=0 before the inserts, then commit after Inserts i can cut off a lot of time. still not as fast but around 2 seconds.
doesn’t work if the call is to a stored procedure(which does the insert).

On my development machine i’m not experiencing this at all. (i dont need to add the autocommit = 0 and i still see < 1 second performance)

the production machine is a VPS, so im suspecting that disk usage may be the primary culprit and someone else has a high disk usage application.

Thanks for the link.

By: chris

chris — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 17:26:07 +0000

Nick, thanks for the response. Unfortunately I haven't looked into "fixing" this issue. It is known that MyISAM is faster than InnoDb, but this is the trade-off you agree to when you want to gain referential integrity and normalized data at the database layer. If this is a high availability production server I would look into some books on the subject. You can also check out some of the posts over at http://www.mysqlperformanceblog.com/. The folks over there have lots of great stuff.

By: Nick

Nick — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 17:20:49 +0000

I am experiencing the same symptoms,
I have no indexes or foreign keys one table, one column. if i use InnoBb 1000 inserts takes around 10-20 seconds MyIsam < 1 second
server is 4 core @ 2.0Ghz with 2818176KB free

any suggestions how to fix this?

By: chris

chris — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 15:23:44 +0000

I was a little suprised myself. This was an empty table actually with only 3 columns: a primary key set to auto increment, a varchar, and date_time. Try it for yourself.

By: Hannes

Hannes — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 07:11:37 +0000

Do you have tons of indexes or foreign keys in your tables? The difference seems to big..