Export huge data into xlsx

I need to export a huge dataset from a MySQL database table with MYISAM engine into a .xlsx file in Laravel.

I'm using the maatwebsite/laravel-excel package, which is based on PHPExcel.

The datased consits of about 500,000 rows with 93 columns (around 46,500,000 cells), and quite a few calculations regarding the header structure.

This is the code I'm currently using:

// $excel_data contains some data regarding the project, nothing relevant here
$output = Excel::create('myproject-' . $excel_data->project->name . '-'.date('Y-m-d H:i:s') . '-export', function($excel) use($excel_data) {

        // Set the title
        $excel->setTitle($excel_data->project->name . ' Export');

        $excel->sheet('Data', function($sheet) use($excel_data) {

            $rowPointer = 1;

            $query = DB::table('task_metas')
                ->where([
                    ['project_id', '=', $excel_data->project->id],
                    ['deleted_at', '=', null]
                ])
                ->orderBy('id');

            $totalRecords = $query->count();
            // my server can't handle a request that returns more than 20k rows so I am chunking the results in batches of 15000 to be on the safe side
            $query->chunk(15000, function($taskmetas) use($sheet, &$rowPointer, $totalRecords) {
                // Iterate over taskmetas
                foreach ($taskmetas as $taskmeta) {
                    // other columns and header structure omitted for clarity
                    $sheet->setCellValue('A' . $rowPointer, $rowPointer);
                    $sheet->setCellValue('B' . $rowPointer, $taskmeta->id);
                    $sheet->setCellValue('C' . $rowPointer, $taskmeta->url);

                    // Move on to the next row
                    $rowPointer++;
                }
                // logging the progress of the export
                activity()
                    ->log("wrote taskmeta to row " . $rowPointer . "/" . $totalRecords);

                unset($taskmetas);
            });
        });

    });

    $output->download('xlsx');

According to the log, the rows are successfully written into the file, however the file creation itself takes a long time. So long in fact, that it doesn't finish it in 1 hour (that's the max execution time of this function).

Exporting it to csv works great, in about 10 minutes it compiles the file & downloads it, however I can't work with that - the output file needs to be xlsx.

What can I do to speed up the file creation process? I'm also open to other alternatives as long as I can achieve the same results.

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