MySQL is faster than PgSQL but a large margin in my program... any ideas why?

Hi all,

On a user's request, I recently added MySQL support to my backup
program which had been written for PostgreSQL exclusively until now.
What surprises me is that MySQL is about 20%(ish) faster than PostgreSQL.

Now, I love PostgreSQL and I want to continue recommending it as the
database engine of choice but it is hard to ignore a performance
difference like that.

My program is a perl backup app that scans the content of a given
mounted partition, 'stat's each file and then stores that data in the
database. To maintain certain data (the backup, restore and display
values for each file) I first read in all the data from a given table
(one table per partition) into a hash, drop and re-create the table,
then start (in PostgreSQL) a bulk 'COPY..' call through the 'psql' shell
app.

In MySQL there is no 'COPY...' equivalent so instead I generate a
large 'INSERT INTO file_info_X (col1, col2, ... coln) VALUES (...),
(blah) ... (blah);'. This doesn't support automatic quoting, obviously,
so I manually quote my values before adding the value to the INSERT
statement. I suspect this might be part of the performance difference?

I take the total time needed to update a partition (load old data
into hash + scan all files and prepare COPY/INSERT + commit new data)
and devide by the number of seconds needed to get a score I call a
'U.Rate). On average on my Pentium3 1GHz laptop I get U.Rate of ~4/500.
On MySQL though I usually get a U.Rate of ~7/800.

If the performace difference comes from the 'COPY...' command being
slower because of the automatic quoting can I somehow tell PostgreSQL
that the data is pre-quoted? Could the performance difference be
something else?

If it would help I can provide code samples. I haven't done so yet
because it's a little convoluded. ^_^;

Thanks as always!

Madison

Where the big performance concern is when

--
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Madison Kelly (Digimer)
TLE-BU; The Linux Experience, Back Up
Main Project Page: http://tle-bu.org
Community Forum: http://forum.tle-bu.org
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-