[Mediawiki-l] Extremely slow import of pagelinks

[Rolf Lampa [RIL]]

Hi all,

I experience extremely slow import of pagelinks.sql (MYISAM). It's only 
about 13 000 000 rows of data so it shouldn't take many minutes. Now it 
takes hours.

I noticed that time for inserts increase as the table grows. Peeking 
with SHOW PROGRESSLIST sometimes says:

+------+------------+--------
| time | State      | Info
| 38   | ** DEAD ** | INSERT INTO 'pagelinks' ...
+------+------------+--------------------------------

I thought it'd be enough to shut off keys during import etc like so:

SET AUTOCOMMIT=0;
SET UNIQUE_CHECKS=0;
SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=0;
ALTER TABLE `pagelinks` DISABLE KEYS;

...and after import activate them again like so:

SET UNIQUE_CHECKS=1;
SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=1;
ALTER TABLE `pagelinks` ENABLE KEYS;
COMMIT;

Since it took so long I aborted the import of tables (tried first to 
import in alphabethical order) and imported all the other tables first, 
and after that I import pagelinks.

I have a dual core with 2GB ram, xampplite on windows.

What am I doing wrong? Does import order really matter that much? (I'da 
already tried all tricks if it only didn't take soooo loooooong to try 
all 'em tricks when its slow like this).

Any ideas about how to reduce time /significantly/ from hours down to 
minutes? I use this data for testing ("consuming" it by processing it) 
and thus I need to often "reinstall" the data, in several databases.

// Rolf Lampa