Magento 1: pros and cons of disabling the indexing on mass product import

Question

I've got a custom script that automatically import a lot of products at once.

I've seen here and there that it is a huge performance improvement to disable indexing when mass importing products.

My questions are:

• Is that sentence true ?
• What are the pros / cons of disabling the indexing before importing ?

Answer 1

Pros:

• it will be faster because it does not index each product at a time.

Cons:

• you won't see your changes real time. You will have to build the indexes manually when you are done.

Simple as that.
I say you should disable it. It's worth it.