The biggest bottleneck is probably not the transformation itself, but doing everything synchronously inside one API request, plus repeated logging and repeated mapping loops. I would first clean the route, precompute the mapping rules, select only required DB fields, and then move the bulk contact processing into a background job with chunked inserts. That will make the import scalable and avoid timeout problems when batch upload is added.

are you in dev mode or production? like if in dev things are generally slowe as different priorities

also yeah depending on where your database is, you have quite the sum of round trips

great suggestion

its dev mode but still i havnt added core functionality to it and yet its taking so long

also i think the overall workflow is messed up im keeping the entire data or csv file in the routes which is not being used

yes, never use dev as any indication of speed. its never going to be as fast as production as it doesnt have as chaotic as a build step as its meant to be fast enough

yeah