Hi All,

I have about 200k data entries in xml file. I wrote php script (using php-xml) to read xml file and insert into mysql. At first it went really quickly inserting, then after a while after inserting 100k entries, it slowed right down, just like it would not even doing anything. I have CentOs with 512M on VirtualBox running as server. Could anyone suggest why it happens like that?

Many thanks in advance

With only 512MB of RAM for the virtualbox image I wonder if it's not running out of memory and having to use swap which could cause this. Do you have a graphical desktop installed on the server? (Like Gnome or KDE) If so it would be good to give it more ram to use.

Thanks for reply,
You are right. I increased that to 4G of RAM and it went quickly finished within 1 or 2hrs. I didn't realize that mysql would need such memory. So what if you have million of entries to insert. What would we do?

Oh, there are lots of different ways to go about performance tuning mysql. I'd start at mysql homepage. I've signed up for the newsletter and find it very informative even tho we don't currently use mysql at work.

One difference is the whole gui environment itself. I like using them (actually, I'm bad about doing lots of stuff in a gui that I should really just stick to a command line) but they can use an awful lot of system resources so the first thing I'd try is starting the system in a command line only mode (init 4? I forget which one to use ) In this case you can always run the server without a gui running and still use a client for the mysql server on a different system.

The other thing I'd suspect when using virtualbox is what type of disk image is used as a dynamically expanding disc can cause lots more io overhead when the disc needs to grow. Maybe try moving to a fixed size disc and see if that helps.

I'm no expert obviously but I hope I at least pointed you in the right direction.