Import issues

[denise]

There are three commonly-reported issues we're seeing with importing your journal right now:

* Some icons are not transfering over -- the message will say that they're successful, but only the keywords/comments will come over, not the userpic itself.

* Entries will appear to have no comments, until you click through to the entry itself, at which point the comments will be visible.

* Tags will appear not to import, until you wait for a little while.

We're aware of all three problems, and are working on diagnosing and fixing them. There's no need to open a support request about these problems.

The other issues described in this news post still apply.

The geeky bits, for those who care:

The first problem is happening because the userpics are in the database, but not in MogileFS, our image-storage filesystem. We know what's happening, but haven't figured out what's causing it yet. Once we do, we'll fix it from happening again, and we'll likely be able to fix it automatically for every affected account (although we can't say that for sure until we locate the root cause).

We think that the second and third problems are happening because of memcached, the function we use to store commonly-accessed information in memory to drastically increase site performance. It may turn out to be something else entirely, of course, but our leading theory right now is that the information is making its way to our database, the database is just not telling memcached that the information's been updated. We're looking into the best ways to solve it. In the meantime, viewing the comment page and then returning to your journal will cause the comment counts to display properly, and some people have reported that viewing the Manage Tags page and then returning to your tags list will cause your tags to show up.


EDIT, 2300 EDT 18 April: We believe we've figured out what was causing these problems. Future imports (anything scheduled after now) should no longer display these symptoms, and we're working out the best way to fix accounts that were affected. We'll make a new dw_maintenance post with the postmortem once we've deployed the fix.

Comments

[denise]

Give it another 3 days (if the importer encounters problems such as not being able to contact the remote site, it tries again with increasing intervals, and 7 days from initial attempt is when the last of them should fire) and if it still hasn't succeeded or given you a failure message, open a support request and hang tight. (It'll likely be a while before someone can get back to you; import troubleshooting is time-consuming and can only be done by people with direct server access.)

[bgmt]

Thank you for the reply. I do not think the reason of the problem could be the impossibility to contact Livejournal (it has been working without any problem all that time); and I do not understand why, when the text in front of my eyes clearly says "you can open another request, but beware that this will abort your previous request", the reality is quite different. I would suggest either change the message, or change the behavior.

Incidentally, the comments were PARTIALLY imported during that import session. Nothing suggests in what I read that the import may be interrupted and a new queue may originate in the middle of an import.

What I am trying to say, is that there is clearly a technical problem on your side.

Thanks again

bgmt

[denise]

I used not being able to contact the remote site as an example -- it's not the only thing that can block an import! A technical issue is entirely possible, but since other imports are completing successfully, it's not a guarantee and if an issue does exist, it's only an issue with importing from your LJ account. (Most commonly, because something about the data in your LJ account is irregular, malformed, or otherwise unexpected -- after ten years, the importer is pretty hardened against "stuff it didn't expect to find", but LJ's been accepting data for so long and has gone through so many changes in terms of what's accepted, what's cleaned, and what's rejected that even after a decade we're still being presented with edge-case data.) In cases like that, the problem will need one-on-one troubleshooting and debugging that can take hours and needs to be done by one of two people, both of whom are very busy, and it can take a long time for one of them to have the time to troubleshoot an i ndividual import problem. Please wait out the 7 day cycle, check your on-site inbox (https://www.dreamwidth.org/inbox) for any error messages -- they won't necessarily be sent to your email -- and then open a support request, including the text of any inbox messages you've gotten.

The "your previous import job will be aborted" applies only if the past job has been scheduled but not started. If some, but not all, of your comments have been imported, scheduling a new import doesn't abort the old one, because otherwise someone will lose their place in the import queue. I took a look, and the comments task for the first import you scheduled a few days ago did fail and is waiting out the delay for the next retry. There should be a message in your inbox to give you more information.