How to Scan 50,000 WooCommerce Products Without Triggering PHP Timeouts

A developer built a catalog scanner for WooCommerce stores to flag common data issues such as missing images, duplicate SKUs, zero prices, and empty descriptions. The naive approach of fetching all products at once with 'limit => -1' quickly exhausts server memory and exceeds PHP execution time limits on large catalogs. The solution involved paginating product fetches in batches of 200 and using direct SQL queries for tasks like duplicate SKU detection, avoiding the overhead of building full WooCommerce product objects. This approach proved especially important on low-cost shared hosting with strict 30-second execution limits and limited memory. Testing also revealed that real-world duplicate SKUs typically originate from CSV imports or direct database edits that bypass WooCommerce's built-in validation, requiring the test seed script to replicate that same bypass.