How to Efficiently Bulk Update Records in ServiceNow

Quick Answer

The reason this pairing is the most efficient approach is that it directly targets the two biggest sources of overhead in a large bulk update: setWorkflow(false) stops business rules, workflows, and other automated processes from firing on each of the 10,000 updates, and setAutoSysFields(false) skips the automatic recalculation of system fields like sys_updated_by and sys_updated_on on every write. Together these avoid a huge amount of unnecessary processing that would otherwise run once per record, which matters enormously at this scale since even small per-record overhead multiplies into a significant performance hit across 10,000 iterations. The other approaches in this scenario each fail to actually solve the problem: relying on GlideRecord alone without these settings still lets business rules execute on every update, splitting the work into multiple separate queries only adds more database round trips rather than reducing them, and applying a limit like 100 would cut off most of the records entirely rather than processing the full set efficiently. The general lesson here is that when a question describes needing to update or process a large number of records efficiently, the answer usually involves explicitly turning off automatic platform behaviors that are not needed for the task, such as workflow execution or system field updates, rather than trying to restructure the query or reduce the record count.