Is this reasonable : $ time ( echo "copy 587321890 records into sample from STDIN using delimiters '\t','\n','';" ; zcat logs20090511.txt.gz ) | recode iso8859-1..utf-8 | mclient -lsql -ukb -Pkb [ 587321890 ] real 618m29.030s 618m is a bit excessive, and well over what I had expected! Background on the machine : its a dual cpu opteron 252, 6 GB ram, running centos5.3/x86_64 stock - storage is from a 2 disk raid0, local to the machine ( sata 7200 disks, md-raid ). size of this logs file, unzipped is : 56854417129 There is almost nothing else running on the machine ( load avg from pre-kickoff was ~ 0 0 0 ). An aggregate querry that I kicked off last night ( about 14 hrs back ) is still running... Are these levels of performance in line with what most people would expect ? Is there a generic tuning guide or a best-practises doc that I should be looking at about now ? As something to compare against, pgsql-8.3 on the same machine, was able to do its bulk load in under 58 min, and then took just over 10 hours to run the aggregate query ( no index's on data ) : - KB