4. If you intend only to read from the table in the future, use myisampack  to compress it. See Section 16.2.3.3, “Compressed Table Characteristics” . 

5. Re-create the indexes with myisamchk -rq /path/to/db/tbl_name . This creates the index tree in memory before writing it to disk, which is much faster than updating the index during LOAD DATA  because it avoids lots of disk seeks. The resulting index tree is also perfectly balanced. 

6. Execute a FLUSH TABLES  statement or a mysqladmin flush-tables  command. 

LOAD DATA  performs the preceding optimization automatically if the MyISAM  table into which you insert data is empty. The main difference between automatic optimization and using the procedure explicitly is that you can let myisamchk  allocate much more temporary memory for the index creation than you might want the server to allocate for index re-creation when it executes the LOAD DATA  statement. 

You can also disable or enable the nonunique indexes for a MyISAM  table by using the following statements rather than myisamchk . If you use these statements, you can skip the FLUSH TABLES operations: 

ALTER TABLE tbl_name  DISABLE KEYS; ALTER TABLE tbl_name  ENABLE KEYS; 

•To speed up INSERT  operations that are performed with multiple statements for nontransactional tables, lock your tables: 

LOCK TABLES a WRITE; INSERT INTO a VALUES (1,23),(2,34),(4,33); INSERT INTO a VALUES (8,26),(6,29); ... UNLOCK TABLES; 

This benefits performance because the index buffer is flushed to disk only once, after all INSERT statements have completed. Normally, there would be as many index buffer flushes as there are INSERT statements. Explicit locking statements are not needed if you can insert all rows with a single INSERT . 

Locking also lowers the total time for multiple-connection tests, although the maximum wait time for individual connections might go up because they wait for locks. Suppose that five clients attempt to perform inserts simultaneously as follows: 

•Connection 1 does 1000 inserts 

•Connections 2, 3, and 4 do 1 insert 

•Connection 5 does 1000 inserts 

If you do not use locking, connections 2, 3, and 4 finish before 1 and 5. If you use locking, connections 2, 3, and 4 probably do not finish before 1 or 5, but the total time should be about 40% faster. 

INSERT , UPDATE , and DELETE  operations are very fast in MySQL, but you can obtain better overall performance by adding locks around everything that does more than about five successive inserts or updates. If you do very many successive inserts, you could do a LOCK TABLES  followed by an UNLOCK TABLES  once in a while (each 1,000 rows or so) to permit other threads to access table. This would still result in a nice performance gain. 

INSERT  is still much slower for loading data than LOAD DATA , even when using the strategies just outlined. 

