When you're adding or updating a lot of data in a table that has a full text search index, you'll find it beneficial to issue the following command before the INSERT/UPDATE:

ALTER FULLTEXT INDEX ON tablename    DISABLE

Then, when you're done:

ALTER FULLTEXT INDEX ON tablename    ENABLE

Sure, you're Full Text index will be out of date for a bit, but it can make the difference between 20 hours of data loading and 20 minutes.

And the FTS index will be handled as a backend process with less impact on your server.

<nods sagely>

Experience is a hard teacher, she gives the test first and the lesson afterwards.