The fix_course_sortorder function is called every time create_course() runs + some other cases. It ends up doing an UPDATE query for every course in the mdl_course table. In our case we have 10,000 courses and so it is doing 10,000 updates. Not only does this result in a huge amount of data needing to be written to the DB disk, it also locks the entire table if it is done within a transaction.

In 2.0, Web Services enable people to do a call to create as many courses as they want, lets say 500. This results in 500 courses * 10,000 update queries, all within a single transaction. This completely locks up Moodle, eg. trying to load course/view.php can block because it wants to write to mdl_course.modinfo. Or trying to update a course settings page will hang there until the lock is released. This results in many requests pooling up and killing the web server.

I have attached a test PHP script + the list of DB queries performed when I run this script. Something really needs to be done about this menacing function!

Thanks