Contact Importing scalability, and scalability of the system in general

[fen]

"One thing they could try would be to program a 'progress bar' of sorts into their application so that the connection at least has some data going through it, forcing it to stay open."

Upvote.  A progress bar or - simpler - even just a counter updated every 100 contacts imported would prevent a lot of import timeout issues.

[Donald Lobo]

import is done via ajax, and it does have a progress bar.

However there is a long runnung import process in the background (via ajax) that is consuming the resources. the status bar just updates where the import is periodically

lobo

[The Next Wave]

Not that this is totally on topic- but I found a tool that splits .csv files quickly via this post:
http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/how-to-split-a-huge-csv-excel-workbook-into-seperate-files/
the first link to the splitter is 404- but this one worked:http://www.fxfisherman.com/forums/forex-metatrader/tools-utilities/75-csv-splitter-divide-large-csv-files.html#post727

[The Next Wave]

Another helpful tool- is Google Refine- or Open Refine: http://openrefine.org/
works for dealing with big data- and prepping it for import. It's fractal function- takes the long list of suffixs- and allows you to fix things like "111" instead of "III" and even pull out Dr and PhD from the Suffix and move it to title if need be.

The drupal module solution doesn't help those of us with Wordpress installs.