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Akeeba Backup for Joomla!

#32322 Post processing upload of large JPA failing to both S3 and Wasabi

Posted in ‘Akeeba Backup for Joomla! 4 & 5’
This is a public ticket

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Environment Information

Joomla! version
n/a
PHP version
n/a
Akeeba Backup version
n/a

Latest post by bdecker on Friday, 24 January 2020 18:17 CST

bdecker
Please look at the bottom of this page (under Support Policy Summary) for our support policy summary, containing important information regarding our working hours and our support policy. Thank you!

EXTREMELY IMPORTANT: Please attach a ZIP file containing your Akeeba Backup log file in order for us to help you with any backup or restoration issue. If the file is over 2Mb, please upload it on your server and post a link to it.

Description of my issue:
Backup completes but post processing fails leaving backup file on server. Tried both S3 and Wasabi with same error. Smaller backups from server succeed but large backup fails. The jpa for this ticket is 7.3GB (800K row database in Joomla).

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager
Actually, Akeeba Backup works fine. The problem is that your CRON server kills the backup before it's complete. This happens because your host has applied a time limit. This is something we've explained for the last 14 years and we know how and why it happens even if very few hosts (basically white label resellers) do not, in fact, understand how the Operating System on their servers is configured.

The most widely used way for this kind of time limits IS NOT the PHP execution time limit. That's a common misconception; the PHP execution time limit has no effect on PHP CLI, as documented by PHP itself. The root cause is, in fact, the CPU usage time limit applied by pam_limits.so, a component of the GNU/Linux family of operating systems. These limits are set up in the /etc/security/limits.conf file or one of the files in the /etc/security/limits.d directory and can be partially overridden in the user's .profile file.

Your host needs to make a change in any of those places to increase the CPU time limit for your user, at least for when it's using CRON jobs. The time limit should be at least as much as it takes to run a backup to completion from the backend of your site. You can determine that by running a backup from the backend of your site and take a look at the reported Duration. That's the number you are looking for.

Contact your host and link them to this support ticket. They will know what to do. The only thing you need to tell them is how long your backups run.

If you're curious and don't mind the gory, technical details I suggest you read this article on user limits (ulimit) in Linux.

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!

bdecker
Hi Nicholas:
Thanks for that information and my apologies that I didn't find that when searching last night. I took your advice and checked the ulimit on this server and I find these settings:

[email protected] [~]# ulimit -a
core file size (blocks, -c) 0
data seg size (kbytes, -d) unlimited
scheduling priority (-e) 0
file size (blocks, -f) unlimited
pending signals (-i) 1546719
max locked memory (kbytes, -l) 64
max memory size (kbytes, -m) 4194304
open files (-n) 1024
pipe size (512 bytes, -p) 8
POSIX message queues (bytes, -q) 819200
real-time priority (-r) 0
stack size (kbytes, -s) 8192
cpu time (seconds, -t) unlimited
max user processes (-u) 4096
virtual memory (kbytes, -v) 4194304
file locks (-x) unlimited
[email protected] [~]#

I've re-read your email and also the ulimit article several times and perhaps I'm not seeing the obvious flaw in my analysis. I've worked with you long enough to know that issues are _rarely_ with Akeeba so I come back to you reluctantly with hat in hand asking if you can provide me with any additional insight.

Thank you Nicholas,

Bruce Decker

bdecker
Nicholas:
I've run some additional tests and now I am able to save the backup directly to S3. I don't believe the hosting provider changed anything but I can't say for certain. Anyway, please stand down and let's assume it is something on my end. I will re-open the ticket if I encounter any additional issues.

Thanks again for the excellent support.

Bruce Decker

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