Hi,
First, it doesn't seem that your message is directly linked to what we're talking about in this thread.
In such a case, it would be better to open a new thread (you can always include a link to the this thread in the new thread as a reference).
The mass action system can be used to update the price of many products at once.
When you create / edit a mass action in the System>Mass actions menu, you can see a section "limitations" with two fields set respectively to 0 and 500. This means that the system will perform the actions on only the 500 first elements found. You can increase that value to process more elements at once. However, depending on how your server is configured, more than a few thousand elements at once should normally end in an error because of the "max execution time" or "memory limit" of the php.ini
You should be able to process 5000 products at once and thus, for 170 000 products, you would have to run the mass action a few hundred times. Not ideal, but better than one by one.
However, if you need to update all the prices at once for 170 000 products and the update is easy, the best is to directly write the MySQL query and run it via PHPMyAdmin.
For example, suppose you want to increase all the prices by 20%, you could just run the MySQL query below in your PHPMyAdmin:
UPDATE #__hikashop_price SET price_value = price_value*1.2
where #__ should be replaced by the table prefix of your Joomla configuration.
This will run in a few seconds maximum even for a few million prices.
Now the MySQL query might need to be more complex if there are different increases for different types of products, etc.
But for a single change to all the prices, this is by far the easiest and quickest.