Bug #80800
Updated by José Ricardo about 7 years ago
When saving a record (eg: tx_news_domain_model_news) and uploading images on field with IRRE of FAL records (eg: fal_media) the database will generate lots of UPDATES on the sys_file_reference table, breaking it when this table is too big (250k+ records).
The reason for that is that the *resorting* method of TYPO3's Data Handler (sysext/core/Classes/DataHandling/DataHandler.php) verifies if there is a "sortby" configuration on the table's TCA, which, in the case of sys_file_reference, is the field "sorting". The resorting method is useful to recalculate the order of the record on a PID using the "sorting" field.
However, unless i'm wrong, there are no places on TYPO3 CMS where sys_file_reference records are listed, so this configuration is useless for this table. Setting it to empty string solves the problem and apparently has no side effects.