title: neo4j import slowing down
body: <p>I'm trying to import a medium data set of about 500,000 nodes into neo4j using cypher. I am running neo4j-community-2.0.0-M05 locally on my 3.4 GHz i7 iMac with SSD.</p>
  
  <p>I am piping the cypher to neo4j shell, wrapping every 40k lines into a transaction.</p>
  
  <p>I am using labels and before I started, I created indices on one property per labeled node.</p>
  
  <p>When I left last night, MATCH CREATE UNIQUE were taking about 15ms each. This morning they are taking about 6000ms.</p>
  
  <p>The slow queries looks something like this</p>
  
  <pre><code>MATCH n:Artifact WHERE n.pathId = 'ZZZ' CREATE UNIQUE n-[r:DEPENDS_ON]-&gt;(a:Artifact {pathId: 'YYY'}) RETURN a
  1 row
  5719 ms
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>pathId is indexed. </p>
  
  <p>I understand this is a milestone build and probably not performance optimized. But I'm less than a third of the way through my import and it's slowing down more and more.</p>
  
  <p>Should I look at some other methods than cypher to import this data?</p>