Thread:Project:Support desk/Quicker Import method/reply (3)

The SQL side isn't the bottleneck. From my experience, the slowness comes from XML parsing that importDump does. At least, straight SQL imports are a lot faster than using importDump to recreate wikis.

Would it be possible to use the MediaWiki API to import the pages? That might be faster for your case.

The slowness could also come from the page parsing that MediaWiki is doing and have nothing at all to do with SQL or XML parsing.