Is there a faster way to upload data from R to MySql?

I am using the following code to upload a new table into a mysql database.

library(RMySql)
library(RODBC)

con <- dbConnect(MySQL(),
  user = 'user',
  password = 'pw',
  host = 'amazonaws.com',
  dbname = 'db_name')

dbSendQuery(con, "CREATE TABLE table_1 (
        var_1 VARCHAR(50),
        var_2 VARCHAR(50),
        var_3 DOUBLE,
        var_4 DOUBLE);
        ")

channel <- odbcConnect("db name")
sqlSave(channel, dat = df, tablename = "tb_name", rownames = FALSE, append = 
TRUE)

The full data set is 68 variables and 5 million rows. It is taking over 90 minutes to upload 50 thousand rows to MySql. Is there a more efficient way to upload the data to MySql. I originally tried dbWriteTable() but this would result in an error message saying the connection to the database was lost.