Question

I have a website that has user ranking as a central part, but the user count has grown to over 50,000 and it is putting a strain on the server to loop through all of those to update the rank every 5 minutes. Is there a better method that can be used to easily update the ranks at least every 5 minutes? It doesn’t have to be with php, it could be something that is run like a perl script or something if something like that would be able to do the job better (though I’m not sure why that would be, just leaving my options open here).

This is what I currently do to update ranks:

$get_users = mysql_query("SELECT id FROM users WHERE status = '1' ORDER BY month_score DESC");
$i=0;
while ($a = mysql_fetch_array($get_users)) {
    $i++;
    mysql_query("UPDATE users SET month_rank = '$i' WHERE id = '$a[id]'");
}

UPDATE (solution):

Here is the solution code, which takes less than 1/2 of a second to execute and update all 50,000 rows (make rank the primary key as suggested by Tom Haigh).

mysql_query("TRUNCATE TABLE userRanks");
mysql_query("INSERT INTO userRanks (userid) SELECT id FROM users WHERE status = '1' ORDER BY month_score DESC");
mysql_query("UPDATE users, userRanks SET users.month_rank = userRanks.rank WHERE users.id = userRanks.id");

Answer 1

Make userRanks.rank an autoincrementing primary key. If you then insert userids into userRanks in descending rank order it will increment the rank column on every row. This should be extremely fast.

TRUNCATE TABLE userRanks;
INSERT INTO userRanks (userid) SELECT id FROM users WHERE status = '1' ORDER BY month_score DESC;
UPDATE users, userRanks SET users.month_rank = userRanks.rank WHERE users.id = userRanks.id;