Akeeba Backup for Joomla!

Tuesday, 20 April 2010 02:41 CDT

user6102

Hi,

After updating to the latest 3.0.b1 yesterday my backups now fail. I am trying to use the zip archive, but when it gets to large files, it just dies. I have tried adjusting the min, max execution settings and the execution time bias with no luck at all. I don't even get a log file for you to see because it just keeps trying and trying to get past the large file for ever.

Then I hit the back button of the browser, I do see an ajax error but it flashes soo quickly I can't read it. This seems to be the only way to get out of the backup cycle. I have tried in both IE7 and Firefox browsers just incase there was a browser problem, still fails.

I did try the jpa format, worked first time. So, is there any hope for the zip format? It did work on these very same files up until yesterday when I upgraded to the newest version. Let me know if you need any more info

Tuesday, 20 April 2010 05:54 CDT

dlb

The zip format does have much more overhead than the jpa format. Calculating the internal CRC32 checksums takes a long time (in computer terms). On the other hand, I wouldn't expect something that worked under a5.1 to fail under b1. I'll flag this for Nicholas to see if this is expected behavior in the b1 version.

Dale L. Brackin
Support Specialist

English: native

Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

????
My time zone is EST (UTC -5) (click here to see my current time in Philadelphia, PA)

Wednesday, 21 April 2010 02:53 CDT

nicholas

I am aware of the problem and I'll publish a developer's release within the hour. Keep an eye on the developer releases page. A formal release will, of course, follow next week.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

Wednesday, 28 April 2010 01:57 CDT

user6102

Hi Nicholas,

I have just tried B2, and although it gets farther in processing it still dies when it gets to my 35MB training videos with zip format. Any ideas?

Wednesday, 28 April 2010 08:35 CDT

nicholas

ZIP + files over a couple of Megabytes + a relatively slow host = almost certain timeout errors. Solution: use JPA instead :) The recipe is around for quite a long time and very well tested. As Dale already said, calculating the CRC32 checksums of those biggie files takes a lot of time.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

Thursday, 29 April 2010 06:03 CDT

user6102

I still had a lot of trouble with the jpa format. Ajax timeout. I finally got it to go but had to set max execution to 5s and time bias to 15%.

You should know though, this is an internal host to our company running in the Fedora 8 in a VMWare virtual environment. It has 2 cpu's dedicated with 1 GB of RAM. This is not an overloaded or slow host. Why are we having trouble now when it used to run perfectly before?

Thursday, 29 April 2010 11:20 CDT

nicholas

It depends on what is running on the server. If you have such beefy hardware assigned, I bet it runs some very big database -- which would explain the very slow execution speed of PHP.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

Friday, 30 April 2010 01:27 CDT

user6102

Actually no, this server only runs my joomla internal employee website. I gave it lots of resources just in case....

So, do you know of any way to optimize the php then? Because really, it should not be lagging at all, we only have 190 employees and I can guarantee they are not all on the site at one time. Or are there some other configs I should look at?

Thanks for your help.

Friday, 30 April 2010 23:58 CDT

nicholas

The first setting I'd look at is the max_execution_time in php.ini. If you have a smallish value, make it a 30. Then, take a look at the memory_limit. I'd suggest at least 16Mb to 32Mb, maybe more if you have tons of extensions on the site. After all, you have a very beefy machine, it can handle the load!

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

Tuesday, 04 May 2010 02:00 CDT

user6102

I took a look at those settings, set memory limit to 45M it was 32M previously, max_execution_time was already at 30. Tried the zip again, and still failed at the same spot the 40M file. I still find it strange that it used to do these files and not fail, but now it does.

I don't have a lot of stuff running here either. Akeeba backup, mighty resources, kunena message board, jce editor and that pretty much it.

Tuesday, 04 May 2010 21:57 CDT

nicholas

There might have been a bug regarding large files handling in the official release. Does the latest developer's release work? Did you try switching to the JPA format? Calculating the CRC32 values the ZIP format requires is time consuming. I can't know how much it can slow things down, but it may be substantial enough to cause a timeout.

I can't think of what else could go wrong. It's really hard debugging such cases without direct access to the server.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

Wednesday, 05 May 2010 01:22 CDT

user6102

Im not sure what the time difference is between us, but I could arrange for us to have a webex meeting where I can give you any access you need to the server to check things out. Im in Canada time zone EST, let me know if this will be possible.

Wednesday, 05 May 2010 03:31 CDT

nicholas

I'm on UTC+2, about 10 hours ahead of you I guess. You can send me an email at nicholas -at- akeebabackup -dot- com so that we can arrange a web meeting.

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

Wednesday, 05 May 2010 04:51 CDT

dlb

Nicholas,

He's in the same time zone as I am. UTC-5+1. He does say EST not EDT. Maybe his government has more brains than mine (not that I think that is hard). So you're 7 hours different, give or take daylight savings.

Dale L. Brackin
Support Specialist

English: native

Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

????
My time zone is EST (UTC -5) (click here to see my current time in Philadelphia, PA)

Wednesday, 12 May 2010 02:28 CDT

user6102

Hey Nicholas,

Good news....sorta. I have built a brand new Fedora 12 server (downgraded the php to 5.2.13.....what an ordeal that was, lol Have recompiled 3 times now to get the right addons activated) and tested out the zip backup. Worked perfectly. I even increased those thresholds to max exe, and still performed well.

So there must be a problem with my older Fedora 8 server. Since there are no more updates for it for a long time I know the software is older'ish. I will be moving my production to this new F12 hopefully tomorrow morning, asuming the rest of my testing goes ok.

So I will keep you posted on my progress, but hopefully there wont be a need for your intervention since it seems like it was my own software causing the problem. The only other difference with this new F12 server is that it is X64 and I gave it 2GB of RAM. Also php.ini has 128MB for processing, where my older one was 64MB.

Thanks so much for all your help and patience!!
Sandy

Ohhh yea, I guess Dale was right I am in EDT (Eastern Daylight Savings Time) but Im not a "he", Im a "she"...lol

Wednesday, 12 May 2010 08:01 CDT

user6102

Nicholas,

I figured out what the problem has been all along. Its the zip library that you can include in your php configuration. I removed --enable-zip and then recompiled php, restarted apache and worked perfect. Might be worth mentioning in the documentation, test with your installation and see if you get the same behavior.

Wednesday, 12 May 2010 10:31 CDT

dlb

My apologies, madam. I will endeavor not to refer to you as a "he" in the future. :D

Dale L. Brackin
Support Specialist

English: native

Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

????
My time zone is EST (UTC -5) (click here to see my current time in Philadelphia, PA)

Wednesday, 12 May 2010 12:01 CDT

nicholas

Which ZIP library do you mean? Akeeba Backup requires zlib to be compiled in. Are you referring to another PHP extension? If so, which one?

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

Thursday, 13 May 2010 01:24 CDT

user6102

The ZIP extension.

I have zlib installed (--with-zlib) but as soon as I added the zip things went downhill. I had to remove --enable-zip from my ./configure statement when compiling php to get things back to normal. At that point I was not sure which one you were using so I added them both. Now I know.

Thursday, 13 May 2010 03:44 CDT

nicholas

That's interesting. I will run the tests with the ZIP extension installed. Thanks!

Nicholas K. Dionysopoulos

Lead Developer and Director

🇬🇷Greek: native 🇬🇧English: excellent 🇫🇷French: basic • 🕐 My time zone is Europe / Athens
Please keep in mind my timezone and cultural differences when reading my replies. Thank you!

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