Thanks a lot, David, I left it running now for approx. 5 days !!! Finally it finished : 17 pages/sec (only) No, i used MyISAM tables. I need to use MyISAM for fulltext indexing. See my next post. But you are probably right: will resolve the problem. I won't try that now, as i am happy enough to be able to go on with enwiki. Btw. perl mwimport worked like a charm for dewiki, itwiki, frwiki , but not for enwiki. Alex