In openimporter and in all maintenance tasks, have a configurable option for this. My server is awesomely fast, and I would like the scripts to stop pausing all the time and just get on with job in hand.
OpenImporter is a "special" case, my mid-term goal is to be able to let it run via CLI, so do the conversion in just one go (and if you have a powerful server and you don't have to hold back, you are likely on a VPS or alike and you have SSH access, so you can run the command).
But, the second problem with the pauses is that there may be a timeout.
Run a maintenance task in a single step from the web interface is risky, because if your apache decides that the script has run for too long, it will "kill" everything at any step it was (and some tasks are *long*, even though those very long tasks are usually associated to attachments), but this is bad, because it could create more inconsistencies than it were to fix.
What would you think of a CLI based tool for maintenance tasks?
Yep, CLI based maintenance tools would useful and a CLI openimporter in particular. I have control of and basic understanding of my apache / php limits, but raising timeouts could cause problems for other users.
I'm playing around with Elkarte right now (elkarte.secretprojects.co.uk) and just ran the attachment maintenance task and it found a fair few issues.