i’m trying to optimise my setup of a Drupal Batch process.

I am reading in thousands of rows of data from an Excel spreadsheet, from multiple worksheets, and creating nodes from the Rows. My import functions work fine, and I can create a Batch, but at present I am creating a batch operation for each row. This means that my batch is very slow (because I’m having to bootstrap Drupal on every row).

What I can’t seem to figure out is a way to setup my batch to deal with ‘chunks’ rather than individual rows.

An example of my import function (of which there are 18) is:

function governbim_coordinate($value){     module_load_include('inc','phpexcel');     global $user;     $project = $_SESSION['governbim']['projnid']; //Load the required worksheet from the excel file passed to the function as $value     $result = phpexcel_import($value,TRUE,TRUE,array('setLoadSheetsOnly' => array('Coordinate'))); //Define some common values for our entity     $values = array(             'type' => 'coordinate',             'uid' => $user->uid,             'status' => 1,             'comment' => 0,             'promote' => 0,             ); //step through each row in the worksheet     foreach($result['Coordinate'] as $coordinate){         $title = $coordinate['Name']; //check to see if this is a new row or if we are updating an existing entity         $action = governbim_node_actions_node_check('assembly',$title);         switch($action['op']){             case 'new':                 $e = entity_create('node',$values);                  $entity = entity_metadata_wrapper('node',$e);                 break;             case 'update':                  $e = entity_create('node',$values);                     $entity = entity_metadata_wrapper('node',$action['nid']);                 break;         } //*** Here is where we write everything to the database with the entity values and $entity->save() ****/     } } 

My batch is setup (currently) as:

function governbim_excel_import_batch(){     drupal_set_message("Importing Data...");     $path = 'public://imports/';     $file = 'COBie-UK-2012-example1.xls';     $datafile = $path.$file;         $operations[]=array('governbim_coordinate',array($datafile));          //another 17 $operations[] defined as above      $batch = array(         'operations' => $operations,         'init_message' => t('Constructing batch operation...'),         'progress_message' => t('Importing Excel data'),         'finished' => 'governbim_excel_import_batch_finished',         'error_message' => t('Importing of Excel data encountered an error.'),         );     return $batch; } 

I realise I need to get some $context stuff into the import function, but I can’t seem to figure out how to setup that aspect properly.

Is anyone able to assist me in re-tuning things so that I can get the batch (with 18 function calls) to display progress of the overall batch and get the batch to execute (say) groups of iterations (as in $limit = 10)?