insert dummy data to mysql fast

Question

I have 1 function in my debug model which i want to use in order to add dummy data to my app to test its speed and such...

the problem is that it needs to add records to 2 different tables and also check for duplicates usernames etc before each record is added to db so it takes a little time...

also this procedure is repeated about $total different dummy records i want to add at once in a for loop...

for example for 100 new users i want to add it takes around 5 seconds to proceed.

is this time fine or do i need to optimize it?

what if i want to add 1000,10000 users at once?? is it possible?

EDIT: Function called to insert data:

public function registerRandomUsers($total = 1){
    $this->load->model("misc_model");
    $this->load->model("encryption_model");
    $this->load->model("signup_model");

    for ($i=1;$i<=$total;$i++){
        $username = $this->misc_model->generateRandomString(15);
        $flag = false;
        while ($flag == false){
            if ($this->user_model->usernameExist($username)){
                $username = $this->misc_model->generateRandomString(15);
            }else{
                $flag = true;

                $password = 'Test123';
                $email = $username.'@email.com';
                $data = array(
                    'username' => $username,
                    'password' => $password,
                    'email' => $email
                );
                $this->signup_model->submitRegistration($data);
                $userdata = $this->user_model->getUserData($username, "username");
            }
        }
    }
}

Answer 1

If you're not worried about having a random string as the user name, just set the $email = 'user'.$i.'@email.com'; (so you don't have to worry about collisions). The main reason this will be running slow is because you're sending a new query to the database on each iteration of the loop - it would be much much faster to generate a bulk insert string like:

INSERT INTO user (email,pass)
VALUES ('user1@email.com','Test123')
,      ('user2@email.com','Test123')
,      ('user3@email.com','Test123')
,      ('user4@email.com','Test123')
,      ('user5@email.com','Test123');

This way you can avoid the overhead of tcp traffic from sending 10000 queries to the database and have it do it all in one go.