import script with many queries causes a slow website

[ianmurph]

We build a link for our offline program to our website. In our offline program we have 50.000 records we want to push to our website. What we do now is the following: In the offline program we build an xml file with 1500 records and post it to a php file on our webserver. On the webserver we read the xml and push it to the mysql database, before we do that we first check if the record already exist and then we update the record or insert it as a new record.When thats done, we give back a message to our offline program that the batch is completed . The offline program builds a new xml file with the next 1500 records. This process repeats till it reached the last 1500 records.The problems is that the webserver become very slow while pushing the records to the database. Probably thats because we first check the records that already exist (that's one query) and then write it into the database (that's the second query). So for each batch we have to run 3000 queries.I hope you guys have some tips to speed up this process.Thanks in advance!