[gavintyte]

Hello (especially Stephen!)

Firstly, I must say that I am very grateful that there is a free importer at all! It’s a very valuable addition to bbPress. However, it would be useful if the published bbPress import documentation was just a little clearer and less confusing. Clearer documentation might save people time trawling for responses or firing off questions that are time consuming to answer.

For example, here, there is NO documentation at all for import options:

https://codex.bbpress.org/import-forums/

a) It would be useful if there was an explanation as to what difference ‘Rows Limit’ and ‘Delay Time’ actually make to the importer. For example, after a search on this forum, I read that one user upped the Rows limit to 10000 and this helped him with a successful import that had previously hung. Why should this be? @netweb suggests 0.1 as a good Delay Time – why? Also, is there a minimum or range of values that are acceptable? For example, would 0.01 an acceptable value and would it make any difference?

b) If ‘Start Over’ is not selected, will the importer always try and re-start where it left off if it was previously stopped? How does it know? Does it trawl through all matches and not replicate them until it gets to data that it hasn’t imported?

In the troubleshooting guide here:

https://codex.bbpress.org/import-forums/import-troubleshooting/

c) I don’t understand the debug information:

• Once the import hangs, click stop, take a note of where it was up to, e.g. Converting 11,299 – 11,300
• Click start again and the import will continue from where it left off
• If it hangs again, take note of where it was up to again
• Once finished make a fresh copy of the source database

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i) Once what is finished? If it hung again then it didn’t finish? Bit confused by this.

ii) If one stops and starts the import, why should it continue where it left off? Why should it not hang immediately? Does it continue with the next batch of rows or does it continue with the table row in which it was stopped?

iii) If one stops import, logs out, refreshes the page, etc. will import start where it left off?

iv) Please define ‘hangs’. If the wheel is spinning during, for example, ‘Converting Replies (480000 – 480999) does this mean it is still working albeit slowly?

Many Thanks

Gavz

[Stephen Edgar]

For example, here, there is NO documentation at all for import options:

https://codex.bbpress.org/import-forums/

This has been added for the next release.

a) It would be useful if there was an explanation as to what difference ‘Rows Limit’ and ‘Delay Time’ actually make to the importer. For example, after a search on this forum, I read that one user upped the Rows limit to 10000 and this helped him with a successful import that had previously hung. Why should this be? @netweb suggests 0.1 as a good Delay Time – why? Also, is there a minimum or range of values that are acceptable? For example, would 0.01 an acceptable value and would it make any difference?

The default values are what we think will work for “most users” without causing any issues, if your MySQL instance can handle more frequent and larger queries than the defaults then these values can be changed to reflect that. Many of the of shared hosting packages have limits on how many and how large these database queries can take place per hour, this is why it is relatively low by default.

If you have an incredibly fast MySQL instance you could set the time between queries (delay) to 0.01ms, I’d suggest not though, this allows MySQL to have some “time up it’s sleeve” for any other tasks it may also be needing, you’d hardly notice the difference between 0.1 and .0.01, you do (or at least I do) notice this on large imports when it is set to 1.0.

b) If ‘Start Over’ is not selected, will the importer always try and re-start where it left off if it was previously stopped? How does it know? Does it trawl through all matches and not replicate them until it gets to data that it hasn’t imported?

Yes, the importer will continue from where it left off, we store this is the wp_options database table.

i) Once what is finished? If it hung again then it didn’t finish? Bit confused by this.

I’ll try to get to update these troubleshooting steps to make this a bit clearer.

ii) If one stops and starts the import, why should it continue where it left off? Why should it not hang immediately? Does it continue with the next batch of rows or does it continue with the table row in which it was stopped?

As per above, at each step during import we update this data in the options table so if the import stops when started again it can resume from where it left off.

And yes, it continues with the next batch of rows from where it left off.

iii) If one stops import, logs out, refreshes the page, etc. will import start where it left off?

Yes

iv) Please define ‘hangs’. If the wheel is spinning during, for example, ‘Converting Replies (480000 – 480999) does this mean it is still working albeit slowly?

The ‘wheel’ is always spinning as each step of the importer progresses, if for example it took ~3 seconds to convert the “Converting Replies (470000 – 470999)” replies, you’d find each batch would typically be taking a similar 3 seconds, once you see per your example “Converting Replies (480000 – 480999)” if that has been stuck on that batch for 30 seconds, a minute, 20 minutes that is pretty much a case of the import has stalled.