ActiveRecord: Creating many records works faster in a transaction
When you need to insert many records into the same table, performance may become an issue.
What you can do to save time is to open a transaction and save multiple records within that transaction:
Copytransaction do 500.times { Model.create! } end
Although you will still trigger 500 INSERT statements, they will complete considerably faster.
When I tried it out with a simple model and 500 iterations, the loop completed in 1.5 seconds vs. 6 seconds without a transaction.
Alternative
Another fast way to insert many records is to have a single INSERT statement describing multiple rows.
In Rails 6+ you can do so with ActiveRecord::Base.insert_all. This is very fast, but you won't get the usual guarantees from validations or transactions.
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