Export Fails (Too Large?)

  • I’m moving from v2.2 to a fresh install of v2.5 on a different host. This seven-year-old blog has 2,241 blog entries and 24,770 comments, with 98% of those blog entries all by a single author (me). Attempting to export this blog’s content simply results in the server timing out. I can export individual authors’ blog entries without difficulty, so long as that individual author isn’t me.

    My theory is that this is simply a memory problem — WordPress is trying to spool all of this stuff in memory before sending it to the browser as a WXR file. Before I start hacking away at export.php, I’m curious if there’s a known solution.

    Can anybody provide some advice?

Viewing 8 replies - 1 through 8 (of 8 total)
  • Keilya

    (@fantasycrusader)

    Why don’t you try using phpMyAdmin and select the Gzip option? *Maybe* it would work.

    Thread Starter Waldo Jaquith

    (@waldojaquith)

    Because it strikes me as unlikely that v2.2 and v2.5 use precisely the same database structure. (If they do, I can just SELECT INTO the data from the v2.2 tables to the v2.5 tables, no exporting required.) If somebody could confirm for me that there are no meaningful differences between the two, I’m certainly game for that approach.

    Thread Starter Waldo Jaquith

    (@waldojaquith)

    Well, I guess I’ll report this as a bug.

    Have you considered updating your existing 2.2 installation to 2.5 on your existing host and *then* using phpMyAdmin, or other MySQL tool, to do the export?

    Or, alternatively, installing 2.2 on your new host, exporting your existing data with another tools as suggested, importing that data into your “new” 2.2 installation, and then updating that to 2.5?

    I don’t see what you are describing as a “bug” in WordPress, but rather as a limitation of your server/PHP installation (memory constraints). ??

    –rlparker

    Well, you can separate the database/tables into several chunks to reduce the amount of memory that’s going to be consumed (thus avoiding timeout), import them into your database at the new host, then upgrade WordPress.

    Oh, humanity, that’s laborious.

    Thread Starter Waldo Jaquith

    (@waldojaquith)

    Or, alternatively, installing 2.2 on your new host, exporting your existing data with another tools as suggested, importing that data into your “new” 2.2 installation, and then updating that to 2.5?

    That’s quite a clever idea. It’s not viable to upgrade my existing install to v2.5 — it would break horribly — but I’m entirely happy to break a duplicate install. I believe I’ll do just that. Thank you for that suggestion.

    I don’t see what you are describing as a “bug” in WordPress, but rather as a limitation of your server/PHP installation (memory constraints).

    I have no way of knowing that to be the problem. I speculate that it’s a result of the quantity of data exceeding what my server can handle, but I have no way of knowing that.

    poorfish1

    (@poorfish1)

    same timing out problem with 2.6.3 – no solution. So WPs fancy export format is useless.

    But don’t worry 2.7 will have a new UI and all will be well, except for problems like this one which languish untouched.
    /sarc

    poorfish1

    (@poorfish1)

    Here’s the fix I used:
    The problem is something in posts or author fields has become corrupt.

    In my case, there was an newer bunch of posts – 142 – by author1. These exported fine. Another 100 older posts were by author2 – these would not export.

    I created a new Admin account called author3. I then selected all author2 posts and saved them as author3.

    All author3 posts were exported fine. I now have all the posts, albeit not in a single file. I still cannot export all authors, but have to export each separately – thus, the conclusion something in author2’s db is corrupt.

    Unfortunately, the author2 account is the primary one, and I haven’t been able to figure out how to delete that – id=1.

Viewing 8 replies - 1 through 8 (of 8 total)
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