On Fri, 2 Dec 2005, Neil Drumm wrote:
Occasionally we need a database update which iterated over each node individually. Since these are a least O(n) operations, we can't trust them to be fast because Drupal runs some big sites. At the same time we can't rely on our ability to change PHP's timeout since safe mode might be on. We don't want to take a long time to do the update without sending feedback to the user since the server churning away looks the same as the server hanging.
In such cases it is worthwhile to investigate if it is possible to offload some of the load to the SQL server as I have done for the first revisions update.
We have two long updates. The forthcoming revisions update promises to be a resource hog.
It is not /that/ bad. For example Drupal.org recently only had about 750 nodes with revisions.
Update 124 needs to iterate every comment.
No idea what it does, but maybe SQL can come to the rescue. Cheers, Gerhard