[wp-hackers] Deleting a lot of posts/terms on plugin deactivation

[Mo Braga]

If this is a one-off operation, use php directly, from the command line:

php <your-bulk-delete-program>.php

You may need to load WordPress in your program.  For an example, see wp-cron.php

-----Original Message-----
From: wp-hackers [mailto:wp-hackers-bounces at lists.automattic.com] On Behalf Of Nikola Nikolov
Sent: 28 June 2013 09:29
To: wp-hackers at lists.automattic.com
Subject: [wp-hackers] Deleting a lot of posts/terms on plugin deactivation

Hello everyone,

I'm currently working on a (yet-another)multilingual plugin for WordPress.
I'm willing to add an uninstall functionality that would allow the user to remove all data created by the plugin(so any options, custom meta, posts, terms, etc). The plugin works by creating a duplicate post/term in a custom post type/taxonomy for each enabled language.

I've noticed that when I have for instance 7 enabled languages and I want to delete a bunch of posts, my WAMP installation would time-out at 60 seconds if I try to delete more than probably 10 posts, since I hook to the delete_post hook and use wp_delete_post to remove the corresponding translation posts - which means, that wp_delete_post is actually called for up to 80 posts.

I realize that wp_delete_post is generally a heavy function, since deletes all post meta, comments(?), etc.

What I'm wondering is whether I should use wp_delete_post or if there would be a different approach to deleting multiple files with less load on the server. Obviously if I stick to wp_delete_post(), I would use ajax-driven uninstall process which would only delete a handful of posts at a time.

I assume one way to beat the timeout would be to try to use
set_time_limit() whenever I delete translation posts, but obviously I can't use this solution for plugin uninstallation, since there could be a lot of data(let's say a thousands-of-posts situation).

----

Nikola Nikolov
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