FlowDrop 2.7.3 Fixes Slow Upgrades on MariaDB

After reports of a database backfill taking 52 minutes, maintainers released FlowDrop 2.7.3 on 9 November 2026 to fix slow upgrades on MariaDB installations. According to the release notes, the patch changes how existing workflow jobs receive references to their associated pipelines during database updates.

The correction affects a post-update operation introduced in FlowDrop 2.6.0. That update fills in pipeline references for jobs created before the new database structure was introduced. The fix is relevant to installations upgrading from FlowDrop 2.5.x or earlier. Sites already running 2.6.0 or later with the backfill completed do not rerun that operation, so the optimisation does not change an already completed upgrade.

The slowdown arose from a database query that MariaDB versions before 11.1 could evaluate repeatedly for individual job records. The original update used a subquery to identify the jobs requiring changes, which could result in substantial processing time on installations with large job histories. MariaDB's MDEV-7487 documents the absence of semijoin optimisation for certain single-table update statements before version 11.1. FlowDrop 2.7.3 avoids the problematic query by updating job records through their primary keys.

The associated issue report documents an upgrade in which the pipeline backfill took approximately 52 minutes on a site containing about 7,000 pipelines. Separately, the maintainer reports that the complete drush updb operation on a MariaDB 10.11 database with 7,407 pipelines fell from 213 seconds to 11 seconds after the change. These are separate measurements, and the reported improvements have not been independently reproduced by The DropTimes.

The revised backfill also handles interrupted upgrades by skipping jobs whose pipeline references have already been populated. Administrators whose earlier database update stopped before completion can rerun drush updb after installing the patch; the operation skips jobs already backfilled. FlowDrop 2.7.3 introduces no additional database updates, and the release notes instruct administrators to clear caches after updating.

The correction follows FlowDrop 2.6.0, released in September, which introduced the database backfill alongside AI-assisted workflow editing and runtime improvements. The DropTimes subsequently covered FlowDrop 2.7 in October, including changes to workflow testing and execution handling. Version 2.7.3 specifically addresses upgrade-time database performance rather than normal workflow execution. It is a stable bug-fix release, not a security advisory.