Trouble importing - import STOPPING!

[Craig Antill]

OK, I have been working night and day to get the templates sorted, and to work through the problems i've been having, and I decided to go ahead and open the thing to the public.

However, there's a problem when I try to import the UBB data into the database. The members import goes fine, but the post import simply stops - at no particular set interval. I tried dropping the number of topics to import to 100 (from 200) but this doesn't make any difference.

Has anyone got any ideas what to do ?

[bira]

Craig,

1) Don't do a mass import. Go one forum at a time.

2) Try various numbers. For small forums 100 cycle worked fine for me, for some forums I had to go all the way down to 10.

In one specific forum, where threads are over 500 posts each, I actually ran a cycle of 5 - it was the only way it would do the import without stopping every time it reached the mega ones :)

[Craig Antill]

Thanks bira - i'll do that later tonight. Right now ? I'm off to the pub to watch the Monaco GP... :p

[bira]

Go Schumi! ;)

[Craig Antill]

OK, I was bored rigid by the race (we'll save the discussion on why F1 is so poor nowadays for our forums... ;)) so I decided to come back and have another crack at this.

I tried as you suggested, but was still getting the same problem. I tried a second time and it took the server down :( We're now in the position of not being able to do anything, bar display static HTML and images from our server, and have no server admin available. This is NOT good. I do hope that this is not a sign of things to come ?

[bira]

Craig, sorry to break this to you, but it means you don't have enough RAM...

The import takes up A LOT of memory. A LOT!

I ran a test import a few weeks ago and I couldn't make it because it sucked up all the memory and stopped half-way.

A couple of weeks ago we added memory (we had 256mb and we upgraded to 512mb) so after that the import went alright with various cycles for the various forums (as mentioned above).

I would also warn you that MySQL sucks up a lot of memory; it takes up any and all memory it can get its hands on and dumps the database on it (which is why you'll find reading the vB a hell of a lot faster than non-SQL BBs). Then again, it's "smart" enough to give up on memory if something else needs it.

The import takes up a lot of memory and although it takes a hell of a lot more than the normal running of the vB, it gives a good enough indication that you lack RAM to run this properly and your users may get error messages of SQL running out of memory in peak hours. So, if that's your situation right now then you may want to upgrade your RAM before making the switch to vB.



[Edited by bira on 06-04-2000 at 07:00 PM]

[Craig Antill]

Thanks bira, I was sort of thinking that myself :( I'll mail my sysadmin... Looks like it's not going to be launched for a few more weeks :( Would this be related to taking the rest of the server down though ?

Geez - the first weekend since late March that i'm not at a racetrack, and I don't actually get /anything/ done... :( grrr...!!!

[Martin]

that really depends, Craig. Everyone talks about the added stability of a Unix/Linux box over NT, but they never seem to mention the fact that when you run out of swap memory on a linux box, it can't handle it and nosedives. That's why so many hosting companies took to shutting down really active UBB's.

I don't know if you're on a dedicated box or on a shared solution, but it's highly possible if you're on a shared server that it was a combination of the import and what others were doing that took the server down. Do you have any idea of the specs?

[Craig Antill]

It /is/ a shared box, but there's only a handful of other sites on there at present, and they're all static HTML and images. I do have the specs hidden somewhere in my in-box, but you know how it goes when you try to find them...! :}

[theprof]

Craig, same thing here. I'm upgrading from 64 MB to thrice that amount. What happened is that when I imported members, the system ran out of memory and the whole system rebooted, so you get connection errors.