Answer - The time to insert a record consists approximately of: Connect: (3) Sending query to server: (2) Parsing query: (2) Inserting record: (1 x size of record) Inserting indexes: (1 x number of indexes) Close: (1) where the numbers are somewhat proportional to the overall time. This does not take into consideration the initial overhead to open tables (which is done once for each concurrently running query). The size of the table slows down the insertion of indexes by N log N (B-trees). Some ways to speed up inserts: If you are inserting many rows from the same client at the same time, use multiple value lists INSERT statements. This is much faster (many times in some cases) than using separate INSERT statements. If you are inserting a lot of rows from different clients, you can get higher speed by using the INSERT DELAYED statement. Note that with MyISAM you can insert rows at the same time SELECTs are running if there are no deleted rows in the tables. When loading a table from a text file, use LOAD DATA INFILE. This is usually 20 times faster than using a lot of INSERT statements. It is possible with some extra work to make LOAD DATA INFILE run even faster when the table has many indexes. Use the following procedure: Optionally create the table with CREATE TABLE. For example, using mysql or Perl-DBI. Execute a FLUSH TABLES statement or the shell command mysqladmin flush-tables. Use myisamchk --keys-used=0 -rq /path/to/db/tbl_name. This will remove all usage of all indexes from the table. Insert data into the table with LOAD DATA INFILE. This will not update any indexes and will therefore be very fast. If you are going to only read the table in the future, run myisampack on it to make it smaller. Re-create the indexes with myisamchk -r -q /path/to/db/tbl_name. This will create the index tree in memory before writing it to disk, which is much faster because it avoids lots of disk seeks. The resulting index tree is also perfectly balanced. Execute a FLUSH TABLES statement or the shell command mysqladmin flush-tables. This procedure will be built into LOAD DATA INFILE in some future version of MySQL. You can