Hi all. I’m having some problems importing my phpBB forum into bbPress. My forum is quite big, those are my stats:
Posts: 576133 | Topics: 32722 | Users: 12306

I first tried a default import with 1000row/1sec setting. It ran for an entire day, however after around 60000 posts it just started giving me dashes (‘-‘ char) and I really didn’t know what to do or if it was normal. So i just stopped it.

After this I wanted to try more rows, assuming it was going to be faster. So I started (2 tries) a 5000 and a 10000 row imports. However I had it on starting conversion for an hours or more, and never actually started converting. I don’t have memory problems or errors, it’s just very slow I guess.

So my question is: Is there a way to import all together, maybe directly with some bash script, from shell without using a webserver. Or something else to speed it up instead of waiting days in my browser?

Thanks.

[@matrixino Participant 11 years, 1 month ago]

Anyone? I’m really having trouble importing… I even tried locally (i7-4770k/16GB/SSD) and it’s taking ages 🙁

[@netweb Keymaster 11 years, 1 month ago]

Typically the ----- dashes occur once you are no longer logged into your site, opening up another page and refreshing it every 2-3 hours eg. http://example.com/wp-admin/index.php should get you around this issue.

As long as you don’t hit memory issues drop the delay time from the default 1 second down to 0.1.

I’d have at a guess the 5,000 & 10,000 settings you tried might have actually been too much, I’d love to be able to get some more SQL debug messages into the output display though to achieve this much of the importer needs to be rewritten so that will happen in a future release.

Down the track I’d like to write some bash scripts to do this directly (using WP-CLI) but this is a way down the track and is not planned at this stage.

[@matrixino Participant 11 years, 1 month ago]

I did what suggested. Going 5000 locally with 0.2 seemed to work fine. However I got again the “dashes” problem. And I was still logged in when it happened (auto-refreshing my admin page). Also stopping and restarting the import, it just continue giving dashes like this:

-----Starting Conversion-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Converting replies (425000 - 429999)

Converting replies (420000 - 424999)

Where it says starting conversion is where i stopped/restarted it. In the try of my first post it also started giving dashes around the 450000th post.

What can I do?

[@netweb Keymaster 11 years, 1 month ago]

You should be able to logout log back in again (just to forcibly confirm that with WordPress), enter the same details on the bbPress import settings you used 5,000/0.2 etc and just click ‘Start’ and it will resume from where it left off.

[@matrixino Participant 11 years, 1 month ago]

OK. I logged out manually and relogged in. Seems that it’s working now, we’ll see…
I’ll report later.
Thanks