Importing large datasets via HTTP
A month-long operation is a good sign that something went wrong? How did you launch the import? If you used a Web GUI, the operation probably timed-out without updating the UI. I doubt your webserver is configured to allow a month-long HTTP request processing. Are you able to connect to the server to check if a PHP process is indeed still running?

Instead of looking for a module to download the imported file every hour, you could rely on a simple cron job using curl or wget to download the file:

0 * * * * wget http://my.supplier.com/products.xml -a /var/log/supplier-products-download.log --no-verbose -O /some/path/products.xml


If I remember correctly, the default XML parser for Feeds uses SimpleXML. It will load the complete XML tree in memory beofore processing it. For a 8Mb file this could start to be an issue (depending on your PHP memory configuration). A beast approach would be to write your own Feed parser (as a Feeds plugin) using the XMLReader API which support a streaming mode (ie. data are processed when reading the file).