UBB.threads PHP Forum Software Community Forums UBB.threads 7 Importer Support Import timing estimate???

Is there a way or does anyone have a feel for how long it will take to import a Classic 6.7.2 into Threads 7.0??
There are:
Forums = 29
Topics = 2983
Posts = 18,574

Thanks Larry

It really varies on enviroment a well, probably be 3-6 hours

Mine took about 8+ hours with:

4,518 Members
16 Forums
13,908 Topics
335,346 Posts

Thanks guys.
Server seems pretty fast and ddoesn't appear loaded.
I have just under 800 users registered.
Server is Apache 1.3.36(unix) x86-64
So i'm guess it should go fairly fast.

Thanks for the input.

Yeh I'd think that it should go fairly well; my server was b0ged for my import so things took a whiel ...

I tested my forums during private beta on the importer at anywhere from 2-6 hours, and my site has a good ammount of content on her .

22 forums
3500 users
3000 topics
22000 posts

approx - 1hr 45mins

(give or take 15 mins as I went out and when I returned was surprised to see it finished already...)

Wow - I sure hope it doesn't take anywhere near 8+ hours to import.


Server 2003 Standard w/SP1
Total topics: 23218
Total posts: 169849
1.8Ghz P4
1.5MB RAM

The total database size with all tables is about 162MB currently in size.

Really? Wow, see you in the year 3000

Just curious...did most of you alert your hosting company about your import? It would stink to have it stopped mid-stream. Does the import place a big load on the server?

oops.... typo. Good catch, at least someone is reading stuff.

The system has 1.5GB of RAM

Mitch, the default settings in the importer should at the most, be kind to your isp (as well as your browser if using IE), you can increase and decrease the speed in the importer file itself (threads per refresh i believe it is).

It may be a good idea to tell your hosting company ahead of time that you're planning an import to a faster and more optimized version of the UBB, I'm sure they'll understand...

But then again, it is usually easier to ask forgiveness than to ask permission...

Thanks, yeah they'll be happy I'm going to SQL-based board.

They'll likely tell you to do it at off-peak hours, so be prepaired to start 8pm and roll onto the morning hours! :x...

I've just imported again (see earlier post).

Last time it was around an hour and a half - this time, less than 30 minutes

3146 Members
17 Forums
3346 Topics
21471 Posts

Can make a difference on time of day. depending upon what else is running on the server.

I went to bed on mine after 4 hours, and it did nothing the 7 hours I was in bed. I hit go button and it started again. It is on forum 9 out of 82. Importing the 3200 plus members took about 1 hour. I am now over 12 hours on the posts with no end in site. At this rate, it will take 2 or 3 days.

Well can't speak for UBB Classic as I upgraded from 6.5.1 Threads to 7.02

11666 Members
11 Forums
23482 Topics
170759 Posts

I also have a dedicated Server 2003 w/1GB RAM and P4 3.0Ghz

My upgrade took just under an hour.

A few hiccups along the way mainly due to my non-familiarity with the software and processes.


As always, make sure you have a valid backup of MySQL, PHP, Website, and UBB before attempting the upgrade.

Then take another backup once you've completed the upgrade and before you start to customize it too much.

Classic will take longer than threads; also yout servers available resources plys a good factor as well.

Totally agree, and probably most don't have a dedicated server.

As some have posted already showing that on their shared server with many, many other sites, have run out of memory for MySQL or other resources that highly impact or even halt the upgrade process.

I count myself among the lucky ones...

One has to wonder what a freaked out webhost is capable of, which is why I highly advise alerting yoru host to your overnight activities of upgrading your forums... :x

my 85,000 went a day, and I wish I had thought of alerting webhost. Seems so obvious now.

Webhost:
. Apache and MySQL are going APE!
.. Fix: Restart them both.

User:
. My import keeps stopping
.. Restart it!

Webhost:
. Apache and MySQL are going ape again, apache listing shows www.thissite.tld.
.. Fix: Suspend www.thissite.tld

I started a test import of a very old version of my database, because I wanted to try it out before I tried it on a newer version and because that copy was already upgraded to 6.5.x.

Almost 20 hours later it's still not finished. It's on topic 26000 out of 33000, and the live database has over 41000 topics, I wonder how long that's going to take. Granted, the live server is quite a bit faster than the test server, but still it seems a bit insane. This is on a Pentium 3 700 MHz with 256MB memory, but the load is around 5% normally (with peaks up to 60%) so it's hardly a performance problem.

Had a look at the code to see if it was easy to change the number of topics per page load, but the numbers were hard coded. It would be nice if it was a variable set at the top so that there is only one place to change. Less risk of mistakes. The load won't be a problem, neither is an overzealous server admin, as it's my own dedicated server and I plan on shutting down the site for a weekend to do the upgrade. Especially since it will take me the better part of a day just to upgrade the database from v6.1 to v6.5...

Is this on Linux or Windows? Flat file transfers are a bit SLOW on most systems. Are you sure RAM and Swap are not being fully utilized?

It's Fedora Linux, there is no significant swap usage. Raised it to 50 topics per page load, but I don't really think it affected the time/topic by much. I'm closing in on 30 hours now and Iä've got 1000 topics to go.

The MySQL isn't tuned, and it's on v4.1.20, but I can't see that it would affect this that much.

It's difficult to say without doing some real analysis.

It could be that the code to do the import is just not well written. It could be your Disks are old and slow. Probably nothing you're going to be able to quickly do except maybe check and see if RAM is an issue. The other items you probably just can't really fix without a lot of time / cost or both.

If your database is 150+MB then you have to be low on memory usage with 256MB for the entire system. If the database is less than that then memory might be okay.

That's definitely slower than normal. The longest import I've had yet has been about 24 hours from a classic board that has 1.1 million posts and about 80k users.

Memory *could* come into play if you have a number of topics with a large number of replies as when it imports them, it reads all of the replies of a topic into memory and then writes them to the new database.

The biggest factor is probably disk speed as there are a large number of database queries done on each refresh, so if your disk speed is slow it will definitely lead to a slow import.

It took about 31 hours before it finally finished. Certainly won't do that again on the test server, next time will be on the production server for sure. I haven't checked, but I don't think I have that many really long threads.

Don't really know what kind of disks are in the test server, but the server is quite old so it's probably no speed freaks.

A CLI version of the importer script would be quite nice though, would feel a bit safer than having to rely on the browser, and it wouldn't need to be done in steps either.

Now I'm off to have a look at all the new features and to start tweaking.