PHP MySQL - Extremely slow loop

Question

I have a database with two tables. "speechesLCMcoded" includes 400K lines of coded text, and "concreteness" includes 80k words with scores.

I wrote a script that looks into the table with parsed text (speechesLCMcoded), I check for each word in another table after removing the tags (concreteness table) and I add up the resulting scores.

I am a beginner in PHP and my code is not optimized at all. I do not mind if my script runs for the entire day, but I cannot have it run for a week. How would you advise me to optimize my script?

My scripts performs everything I need. It is just way too slow.

<?php
//Include functions
        include "functions.php";
        ini_set('max_execution_time', 900000);
        echo 'Time Limit = ' . ini_get('max_execution_time');

//Conecting the database
        if (!$conn) {
         die('Not connected : ' . mysql_error());}

// make LCM the current db
        mysql_select_db('senate');
        $data = mysql_query("SELECT `key`, `tagged` FROM speechesLCMcoded") or die(mysql_error());

// puts the "data" info into the $info array 
        while($info = mysql_fetch_array( $data) ){
        $key=$info['key'];
        $tagged=$info['tagged'];
        unset($weight);
        unset($count);
        $weight=0;
        $count=0;

// Print out the contents of the entry 
        Print "<b>Key:</b> ".$info['key'] .  " <br>";

// Explodes the sentence
        $speech = explode(" ", $tagged);

// Loop every word  
        foreach($speech as $word) {

//Print each word       
        //Print "<b>Key:</b> ".$word .  " <br>";

//Check if string contains our tag

if(!preg_match('/({V}|{J}|{N}|{RB})/', $word, $matches)) {} else{

//Removes our tags
        $word = str_replace("{V}", "", $word);
        $word = str_replace("{RB}", "", $word);
        $word = str_replace("{J}", "", $word);
        $word = str_replace("{N}", "", $word);
        $word = str_replace("{/V}", "", $word);
        $word = str_replace("{/RB}", "", $word);
        $word = str_replace("{/J}", "", $word);
        $word = str_replace("{/N}", "", $word);

        //print $word .  " <br>";

        //Check for the score
        $checksql = "SELECT word, score FROM concreteness WHERE word = '$word'"; 
        $query = mysql_query("$checksql"); 
        $check_count = mysql_num_rows($query);          
            if($check_count > 0 ){ 
            $data2 = mysql_fetch_assoc($query);
            $weight=$weight+$data2['score'];
            $count=$count +1;
        //  echo $weight;
        //  print "<br>";
        //  echo $count;
        //  print "<br>";
            } else {  
        //  echo"The word was NOT found.<br>";            
 }   }      
        }

        $sql = "UPDATE speechesLCMcoded SET weight='$weight', count='$count' WHERE `key`='$key';" ;
        $retval = mysql_query( $sql, $conn );
        if(! $retval )
        {die('Could not update data: ' . mysql_error());}
        echo "Updated data successfully\n";   

}?> 

Answer 1

For every row from speechesLCMcoded (400K rows), you exec str_replace and sql query.

You can remove tags into first sql query use replace function ( http://dev.mysql.com/doc/refman/5.0/en/replace.html ). You do not need exec str_replace x 8 for every row.

It's first step.

To second step you can use one query only with use join to get all data from two tables.