Thanks for the reply. Before I change my importing scheme, do you have a rough estimate of the import speed increase using pywallet. If it takes 8-10 minutes using bitcoind, do you have a rough estimate of how long it will take for pywallet... 5 minutes? Also, if I stay using bitcoind, can I upgrade my hardware to increase speed? Thanks again!
I remember a topic there was a topic that discusses the time of pywallet vs json-rpc commands, and pywallet was considerably faster but I don't have the link. The limiting factor when importing is probably the hard drive because of the wallet database transactions (assuming you're not rescanning after every key imported).