Update about 1 million rows in MySQL table every 1 hour

@olegrain,

I used Cron on a daily basis to download and convert three XLS Spreadsheets to MySql Database Tables. This task used to take over a minute to complete... also the task used to frequently fail because of 100% CPU loading sometimes necessitating a reboot

After numerous attempts at refactoring eventually the same task now completes in just over ten seconds and now runs every hour!

The drastic time reduction was due to the frequent use of PHP flush(). Try giving the flush command a whirl and see if it makes a difference.