Moving a page under a new parent by API is very slow

[lpa]

I am having slow performance when moving pages to a new location using api. What could be the reason that moving one page takes 3-4 seconds with this code? I think it should move many pages per second. Could it be the page path history, that takes so long to save?
 

$to = $pages->get('/path/to/');
$articles = $pages->get('/path/from/')->children();
$i = 0;
$c = $articles->count();
foreach ( $articles as $item ) {
        $item->of(false);
        $item->original_category = $item->parent->title;
        $item->original_path = $item->url;
        $item->parent = $to;
        $item->save();

        $i++;
        printf("%d/%d %s                                                   \r", $i, $c, $item->url);
}

 

[Zeka]

Hi @lpa

It depends on how many pages you have in the system. There is a 'rebuildAll' method in the PagesParents class that runs every time you move a page. Take a look at this issue https://github.com/processwire/processwire-issues/issues/1459 
You can try to use transactions if you use InnoDB.

[lpa]

OK, thanks. And there seems to be no solution yet for this problem. Or how could I use transactions?

[Jan Romero]

While I agree that it shouldn’t be slow, I feel like moving pages should be an extremely rare occurrence and if you do it frequently as part of your usual operations, there probably exists a better way. Especially if those pages are publically accessible, because cool urls don’t change. For pages that just hold internal data, maybe one of the Repeater variants could be a better fit. Or a ProFields Table, or a something custom. Maybe instead of moving children around, just have Page References.

[lpa]

Yes I agree. But we are doing a big restructuring of our content and to have the redirections handled by PW page history, we are moving the pages using the API. Unfortunately we have thousands of pages to move to archive and it will take time....