We repeatedly hear from people that they assume that since mongoimport ships with MongoDB that it would be faster than anything they could write with a driver.

The fact is the opposite at least until the SERVER tickets to have mongoimport run batch reads, writes and multiple parallel threads are addressed.

I believe we should have right on the mongoimport page a NOTE (like we do for type non-preservation) that mongoimport is singlethreaded and sends one document at a time, and therefore anything reasonable written by the enduser should be able to perform much better.