1,000,000 Simple Products (Free Lite)

The free Super Speedy Imports Lite edition imported 1,000,000 simple WooCommerce products in 21 minutes 28 seconds on a modest 4-vCPU server, at a flat ~128 MB of memory. That is the same speed as the paid Pro edition (22m 30s), because the free Lite download keeps Pro’s entire import engine and only drops paid features, not speed.

Summary

• Result: 1,000,000 products in 21m 28s wall clock (17m 24s of import-stage time), ~958 products/sec through the stages.
• Same engine as Pro: the GitHub Lite build keeps parallel workers and the direct-mysqli fast path. It drops variable products, ACF fields and PHP-function mapping, none of which a simple-product import uses.
• Which free build: this is the GitHub Lite download. The WordPress.org copy runs single-worker (WordPress.org forbids proc_open) and is about 4x slower. For full speed for free, use the GitHub Lite edition.
• Compare: see the Pro vs Lite comparison for all three editions side by side.

Per-stage breakdown

Within run-to-run variance of the Pro run at every stage. The small differences are noise on a shared cloud box, not a Lite advantage.

Key finding

For simple products, Pro and the free Lite edition are the same speed. Pro’s value is capability (variable products, ACF, PHP-function mapping and the full GUI), not simple-product throughput. If all you need is fast simple-product imports, the free Lite edition does it just as quickly.

Methodology

• Server: Hetzner cloud, 4 vCPU, 7.6 GB RAM, PHP 8.2, MariaDB 10.11, WooCommerce, WordPress. MariaDB temp files on disk.
• Plugin: Super Speedy Imports 2.73 Lite (GitHub edition), --workers=4 --performance.
• Baseline: clean cold start (0 products, 0 terms) restored from a snapshot, identical to the Pro run. One run (indicative, not averaged).

Dataset

• Products: 1,000,000 simple WooCommerce products.
• Taxonomies and attributes: hierarchical category, brand, tags, plus five attributes (colour, size, material, pattern, style). About 10 terms per product, ~10 million term relationships.
• Images: external, colour-matched, served via our External Images plugin (not downloaded) – the images still display on every product, which makes External Images ideal for affiliate and dropship stores.

Reproduce

• Dataset (311 MB CSV): simple-products-1m.csv
• Config and taxonomies: the simple-products-1m folder in the super-speedy-imports-demo-data repo.

1. wp ssi import-taxonomies taxonomies.json
2. wp ssi create "1M Simple" product simple-products-1m.csv config.json
3. time wp ssi <id> --workers=4 --performance