Export large Excel/CSV (10-20K records)

Maybe try spout - it's a lot lighter than the php excel. It doesn't do everything that php excel does, but for straight xls it's pretty fast.

Make chunks of the files. I have been using this to export over 100k rows from database into excel files

const MAX_CHUNK_ROWS = 2500;

...

$backupRowsCount = count($this->exportData)
$current = 0;
while ($current < $backupRowsCount) {
            $next = $current + self::MAX_CHUNK_ROWS;
            if (is_array($this->exportData)) {
                $chunk = array_slice($this->exportData, $current, self::MAX_CHUNK_ROWS, true);
            }
            else {
               $chunk = $this->exportData->slice($current,self::MAX_CHUNK_ROWS, true);
            }
            $command->exportName .= "{$current}_{$next}";
            $command->exportData = $chunk;
            $command->exportFile();
            $current += self::MAX_CHUNK_ROWS;
            $percent = ($next / $backupRowsCount) * 100;
            $this->comment("{$next} rows exported to {$command->exportName} [{$percent}%]");
            $command->exportName = $oldExportName;
        }

I've just released Fast Excel (https://github.com/rap2hpoutre/fast-excel) which consume less memory and is a bit faster.

Just use https://csv.thephpleague.com/ , its extremely faster, exported 75k in less than 1 min, and less than 3mins using background queue worker

I was never able to do it using LaravelExcel, but managed to do it using spatie/simple-excel. https://scalablecode.com/how-to-export-large-datasets-to-excel-in-laravel/

LaravelExcel is a bit heavy and always exhausts the memory with large datasets.