[Plugin: Duplicator] Process time up to 10 minutes…

Hey inthemix,

Depending on the size of your site and the current load of your server, any package under 100MB shouldn’t really take more than 5-10 mins to install. However that may not always be the case especially with shared hosting. Your script may have hit a timeout.

Currently with version 0.2.3 the timeout is 15 mins. You can manually increase these settings by opening your install.php file and increasing the following lines:

//time in seconds
ini_set(“max_execution_time”, “900”);
ini_set(‘memory_limit’, ‘256M’);

Try to increase these settings and see if your process completes.

Hope this helps.

Thank you! I will try that if the next one does the same thing. I didn’t want to leave my site down for too long waiting on an answer so I moved it manually.

Thanks again!

Jeremy

So on a 500 mb site, which really isn’t that big at all, and using GoDaddy shared hosting, the plugin is essentially rendered useless?

Hey bobschecter,

Your right on some systems it may not work, however there are some workarounds, and over time we hope to get past them. I think the thing to remember with this plugin and plugins that are similar is that they are quite complex. There are many variables to consider when working around complete migration and backup solutions. This is why there are only a few plugins like it in this space that are free, and even the commercial solutions run up against many of the same issues.

The issue with shared low cost hosting is that many restrictions are placed on bandwidth and process run-times within your sandbox. In order to run a complete database backup and scrub that data, along side archiving all the files on a WP system you can run into timeout issues.

The PHP ZipArchive class (currently what the Duplicator uses) has some limitations itself. Many hosts also restrict what calls are available to programmers in the PHP API on their systems, which adds another set of obstacles. We are currently researching some other approaches to the archive process.

At its current version the plugin does run much better on smaller sites (sites under 200MB) because of restrictions placed by some hosting providers. The plugin will eventually make it past these hurdles as the code is fine tuned to deal with the 1000’s of different configuration scenarios. In the meantime I suggest just that users just exclude the bulk of their data from being archived and then manually FTP it over.

The bulk of most web sites resides in the wp-content/uploads folder. This data can be excluded from the archive process as to speed up the overall process of archiving your site and get past any system constraints that may come up with how the host has configured your server.

I know for some that process is not except-able, and that’s where I usually point them to look into a commercial product (of which have many of the same problems and constraints).

I have ran the duplicator on some hosts where the archive was over 1GB without issues, while other hosts just won’t process the sites no matter what the size. So to your point it can ‘unusable’ on some hosts while other hosts it works without a flaw.

Overtime and with help from the community we should be able to work past many of these hurdles…

First, I appreciate that you are being diplomatic and not saying GoDaddy’s service is the major part of the problem. I understand that and that’s why I’m moving over to HostGator. Of course, that’s one of the reasons for using the plugin, but I’ll make the leap to BackUp Buddy to be sure I have no issues. I was also going to use InstantWP, which is how I found your plugin. However, after seeing that your videos, Backup Buddy’s videos and the overwhelming consensus in the WP forums, I’m going to work with xampp, so for the near term, I’ve done my own work around.

Thanks for the quick response.