strange performance times

Hi everyone,

I have worked with a time function provided by the operating system for measuring the time it takes for a program to insert 50000 rows into a table. The database is created and populated with the program. I am trying out different engines to see which one does best. But the results I get seem strange.

MyISAM
user-time: 27.465
system-time: 1.782s
elasped-time: 0:36.21 80.7%
I/O: 0+0io
page faults: 9pf+0w

InnoDB
user-time: 35.007
system-time: 5.594
elapsed-time: 1:41.46
cpu-usage: 40.0%
I/O: 0+0io
page faults: 88pf+0w

I’m not sure where that extra elapse-time is being spent but my guess is that it could be time spent writing to disk. Is it required to change certain variables in the mysql environment to make BDB or InnoDB work faster?

Thanks,

Ed