Bulk update wordpress posts

Question

Coders. I'm really new in WP Coding, I have zero knowledge, here we are. I created a plugin (actually found it, but I did some modifications) which update all my wp posts.

Let's show you the code,

if ( ! class_exists( 'MyPlugin_BulkUpdatePosts' ) ) :

class MyPlugin_BulkUpdatePosts
{
    public function __construct()
    {
        register_activation_hook( __FILE__, array( $this, 'do_post_bulk_update' ) ); //Run this code only on activation
    }

    //Put your code in this function
    public function do_post_bulk_update()
    {
        $posts_to_update = get_posts('numberposts=-1'); //numberposts for post query, "-1" for all posts.
        foreach ( $posts_to_update as $update_this_post ):

        //update query goes here

        endforeach;
    } 
}
endif;

As you can see, it makes a query to the all posts, The main problem is I have 10k+ posts, But when I use this my server gets crashed, It gives a "503 Unavailable". But When I use 50-60 posts, it's works.

How can I make this work by less resources ?

Answer 1

One implementation detail of how WP works with database is that it always drags all query results into PHP values and memory space. In other words it is highly unlikely to throw any heavy query at WP and not have it collapse. Notably any plugins that deal with large queries (such as database backup ones) often write their database access layer from scratch instead of using WP API.

So implementing bulk operations has to be a little more elaborate. Querying should be split into smaller batches and they should be processed sequentially. You would need to write that logic yourself or find an existing solution. I think there are some around, but I hadn't used any generic ones.

The alternate approach, in some cases, is to hook update logic to access of individual posts. If giant one-time complete update of everything is not required, updates can be spread over time in such fashion with no need for throwaway update code and no concern about resource impact.

Answer 2

10k+ updates must take time. Depending what you need you could operate on the Wordpress tables like wp_posts using raw SQL queries but I don't think it would speed up things substantially.

Because the problem is I think time - if that is a one time operation - you could solve the problem by changing the max_execution_time in php.ini giving the scripts much more time for the updates. For this you'd need to have access to the server's configuration. If you don't you could install a server pack (like XAMPP) on your local machine, there do the update operation and then move the updated DB to you production server.

There are other solutions for changing that variable on remote servers but they are usually turned off the by admins.