Errors after upgrading to 4.2.5

[pnhltt]

Don't want to start a new thread as issues are related but feel free to move this to a new thread.

We've moved the forum to a new server, there was lots of warnings on a lot of pages. Messages would get duplicated, some scripts wouldn't run properly. We read a suggestion that upgrade would solve most of them. We've run the upgrade from 4.2.3 to 4.2.5 and there was a message at the end strongly recommending rebuilding a search index. Not only it took hours but it caused absolute havoc with all sorts of systems (http error 500 and so on). Those got fixed but now user related searches come back empty, ie no messages or threads for a particular user when you run the request.

Any suggestions on how to fix this?

[Wayne Luke]

It is preferred that customers start their own threads for issues.

What version of PHP are you using?

[pnhltt]

phpMyAdmin 4.6.6

these tables
vb_searchcore_text
vb_searchcore
vb_searchgroup_text
vb_session
vb_searchgroup
vb_searchlog

and maybe others in the database have shed a lot of "weight" after rebuilding of the search index. This more than halved the database. I wonder who had the "bright" idea of attaching the message about the necessity of rebuilding of search index to the upgrade? When one tries to find all posts/topics for a particular user only the results post upgrade/search index rebuild are shown.
I know at least another forum which had the same problem.

[Mark.B]

We need the php version please, not the phpmyadmin version.

[pnhltt]

php 5.6.30

[Wayne Luke]

Rebuilding the search engine in the AdminCP is often problematic. Especially on medium to large sites. The process is subject to the limitations of the webserver and requires an open browser. You can restart it and choose not to empty the search engine. It will pick up where it left off and continue indexing. Repeat when it stalls again.

If you have command line access, you can rebuild the search engine over SSH with more success. You would move the file searchindex.php from your download package's do_not_upload folder to your forum index directory on the server. Then you can run it with PHP using the command: php searchindex.php

You can let this process run in the background if you follow the instructions for creating background processes for your Operating System. There are numerous tutorials on the web about this.