Create 1 Million Fake Users in Laravel Fast in Under 5 Minutes

Laravel has a neat way of generating fake data to your database for development and testing purposes.

Using Laravel Seeding, you can quickly seed a hundred records to your users table. That's done in less than a second, no problem.

User::factory(100)->create();

How about a thousand? Okay, that's done in around 4 seconds:

User::factory(1000)->create();

How about a hundred-thousand? That takes around 6 minutes, and starts hurting your server:

User::factory(100000)->create();

Now how about a million? Don't even bother, your server will freeze to death:

User::factory(1000000)->create();

So, how can we actually seed fake 1-million users to our database? We use chunking and database transactions.

Here is our OneMillionUsersSeeder class generated via php artisan make:seeder OneMillionUsersSeeder:

<?php

namespace Database\Seeders;

use App\Models\User;
use Illuminate\Database\Console\Seeds\WithoutModelEvents;
use Illuminate\Database\Seeder;
use Illuminate\Support\Facades\DB;

class OneMillionUsersSeeder extends Seeder
{
    /**
     * The number of fake users to create.
     */
    protected static $users_count = 1000000;

    /**
     * The number of fake users to chunk
     * based on the users count.
     */
    protected static $chunk_size = 1000;

    /**
     * Create 1-million users quickly (~5 minutes)
     * in non-production environments such as
     * local and staging environments.
     * 
     * To do this, we implement chunking and database transactions
     * to speed up the process significantly and reliably.
     */
    public function run(): void
    {
        if (app()->environment() == 'production') {
            return;
        }

        for ($i = 0; $i < self::$users_count / self::$chunk_size; $i++) {
            DB::beginTransaction();
            try {
                User::factory()
                    ->count(self::$chunk_size)
                    ->create();

                DB::commit();
            } catch (Exception $e) {
                DB::rollback();
            }
        }
    }
}

Here it is run by the cheapest 5USD VM in Linode:

1-million fake users created in 332,443 ms (5 minutes).

How about a billion? We shall see.

You may see the demo Laravel source code here.