Update or Create from new

That is so specific that I'm not sure anyone can answer. The best you can do is try it.

@bugsysha you are probably correct. I was looking for someone that may have done something similar and it would say to me "oh, i got great results by ....". I did some pruning and the 2 files have about half the records. It takes 30 minutes to process on my desktop, the server should be a little faster, but 30 minutes is doable.

Great. For me, the hardest part about problems is waiting for an answer or solution. I always try to resolve everything by myself.

@dan3460 How is the file being handled on upload? Looping over all results from the csv? Is this a MySQL database?

@joefusco Yes it is looped over and it is going into a MySQL.

 $handle = fopen('customer.csv', 'r');
        while ($csvLine = fgetcsv($handle, 0)) {
            $customer = new Customer;
            $customer->custno = $csvLine[0];
            $customer->name = $csvLine[1];
            $customer->salesman = $csvLine[18];
            $customer->lastsold = ($csvLine[21] == '/  /') ? null : Carbon::createFromFormat('m/d/Y', $csvLine[21]);
            $customer->lastpaid = ($csvLine[22] == '/  /') ? null : Carbon::createFromFormat('m/d/Y', $csvLine[22]);
            $customer->hold = ($csvLine[38] == 'F') ? false : true;
            $customer->email = $csvLine[70];
            $customer->altemail = $csvLine[71];
            $customer->save();
        }
        fclose($handle);

@dan3460 I imagine you would see a big performance improvement if you insert it directly with MySQL. I had built an importer for an app a couple years back where looping in php took way too long, as I was dealing with a similar data volume. Give MySQL's load data infile a shot. Some benchmarks I took show about 1 million records into a table from CSV in about two minutes using that method (performed on some pretty cheap hardware). More info on MySQL's load data here:

https://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/8.0/en/load-data.html

@joefusco That is interesting, didn't know that such a command existed. I'm guessing you could put the execution of the command as a raw sql from Laravel. I will play with it.

Thanks very much.