I'm trying to figure out how much RAM it uses in the worst case.
I can limit
sort's memory usage. I'm more worried about the
grinding this causes on the hard drive. I have no idea how much data gets read and written to sort 30 GB, but I assume every bit gets pickup up at least several times.
On second thought, I just had one of my server's disks fail a couple days ago (all data was lost), so I'm not comfortable running these updating scripts on the rest of my hardware with all that grinding until I can set up a proper backup plan for TBs of my data.