Improving bulk insert performance in Entity framework

There is opportunity for several improvements (if you are using DbContext):

Set:

yourContext.Configuration.AutoDetectChangesEnabled = false;
yourContext.Configuration.ValidateOnSaveEnabled = false;

Do SaveChanges() in packages of 100 inserts... or you can try with packages of 1000 items and see the changes in performance.

Since during all this inserts, the context is the same and it is getting bigger, you can rebuild your context object every 1000 inserts. var yourContext = new YourContext(); I think this is the big gain.

Doing this improvements in an importing data process of mine, took it from 7 minutes to 6 seconds.

The actual numbers... could not be 100 or 1000 in your case... try it and tweak it.

There is no way to force EF to improve performance when doing it this way. The problem is that EF executes each insert in separate round trip to the database. Awesome isn't it? Even DataSets supported batch processing. Check this article for some workaround. Another workaround can be using custom stored procedure accepting table valued parameter but you need raw ADO.NET for that.