by Hooray » Thu Dec 13, 2018 10:22 pm
I don't know whether the back-end code responsible for this is openly available or not (i.e. if we can take a look or not), but depending on the bottleneck/nature of the problem, one relatively simple change would be accepting a compressed text file with the objects/positions to be added.
If the bottleneck/timeout is elsewhere (e.g. between different servers), another thing that might help is not to directly update the database, but instead do those updates in "batches", e.g. by adding cron jobs to spread out the database queries (as in, a simple form of load-balancing).
Obviously, there won't be immediate feedback that way, but the back-end script would merely split up the import and creates batches of import queries and executes those in a staggered fashion - that way, there would be no problem from a timing standpoint, because the CGI (server) side would only ever add cron jobs instead of accessing the database back-end directly.
To make more specific suggestions or to provide patches, one would obviously need to have a look at the corresponding modules (ideally git repo links)