title: Laravel 4 Seeding many rows, artisan stops
body: <p>I'm working on migrating a really old project to laravel and I thought about seeding the database with my old content to the new database. </p>
  
  <p>Here is an example of how I do this for one of my tables:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;?php
  
  class CallsTableSeeder extends Seeder {
  
      public function run()
      {
          $hostname = 'localhost';
          $username = 'root';
          $password = 'root';
          $link = mysql_connect($hostname, $username, $password);
          mysql_select_db('olddatabase');
  
          $callselect = 'SELECT * FROM calls';
          $ressource = mysql_query($callselect);
  
          $calls = array();
  
          while($item = mysql_fetch_object($ressource))
          {
              $calls['id']=$item-&gt;id;
              $calls['author_name']=$item-&gt;author_name;
              $calls['comments']=$item-&gt;comment;
              DB::table('calls')-&gt;insert($calls);
          }
  
  
      }
  }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>And in my DatabaseSeeder.php I have:</p>
  
  <pre><code>&lt;?php
  
  class DatabaseSeeder extends Seeder {
  
      /**
       * Run the database seeds.
       *
       * @return void
       */
      public function run()
      {
          Eloquent::unguard();
  
          DB::statement('SET FOREIGN_KEY_CHECKS=1;');
  
          $this-&gt;call('MembersTableSeeder');
          $this-&gt;command-&gt;info('The Members table has been seeded!');
          $this-&gt;call('ContactsTableSeeder');
          $this-&gt;command-&gt;info('The Contacts table has been seeded!');
          $this-&gt;call('CallsTableSeeder');
          $this-&gt;command-&gt;info('The Calls table has been seeded!');
          $this-&gt;call('ClientsTableSeeder');
                      //and so on
      }
  
  }
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The thing is that when I do php artisan migrate:refresh --seed I get the migrations done and the seed message for the first table (it only has 8 rows in it) but nothing else. The command seems to stop after a while and the second table (Calls) will only get some of the values from my old table. It seems it has a running time that stops it from doing the loop for all the rows, but I see no message whatsoever, it just plains stops and when I check the database everything seems correct except the number of rows inserted (I'm missing a few thousands, it is a large database).</p>
  
  <p>Maybe this isn't supposed to be the way to be doing this but so far it seemed like it worked for the job, except for this issue. How can I run the command for a longer period of time?</p>