Laravel chunk and delete

Question

I have a large number of items (1M+) that i want to delete from a database, i fork a background job to take care of that, so that the user won\'t have to wait for it to finish t

Answer 1

As Kelvin Jones points out, the reason the random number of items is being deleted is that you're deleting records as you page through them.

chunk simply uses offset & limit to "paginate" through your table. But if you delete 100 records from page 1 (IDs 1-100), then go to page 2, you're actually now skipping IDs 101-200 and jumping to 201-300.

chunkById is a way around this

Post::where('arch_id', $posts_archive->id)->chunkById(1000, function ($posts) {
    //go through the collection and delete every post.
    foreach($posts as $post) {
        $post->delete();
    }
});

Literally just replace the method name. Now, instead of using offset & limit to paginate, it will look at the maximum primary key (100) from the first page, then the next page will query where ID > 100. So page 2 is now correctly giving you IDs 101-200 instead of 201-300.