faster inserting from dump?

hello.

how can i increase the speed of building a database from a dump?  there are
currently many tens-of-thousands of insert statements...i assume that a
commit is run after each statement?  i am guessing that it would be faster
if i commit after every hundred or thousand?  is there an easy way to tell
psql to do this?

please respond directly to me if it is not inconvenient.

thanks
chris