Better mass move/prune/delete?

[dreamygirl]

When searching online I see people have issues with mass pruning or moving. Though their complaints seem to be older, I did experience a problem when I tried to prune posts. I may have to use small batches but I have a large number to do.

I also read some people had written their own Unix scripts to do it efficiently (even back in 2001 and 2003). I don't believe my timeout is set too low. I also know I could probably delete through phpMyAdmin however I'm not wanting to have to take the site offline to optimize the table after every time I do a mass operation. If there is no other way I will either do small batches over time, or do the table method, but I am hoping for other ideas. If I am doing small batches, I would love to have a script to sleep and initiate the next batch, if I was confident it wouldn't cause a problem.

I am on 3.7x. Thank you.