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Site Restoration

#32446 Error reloading fof30

Posted in ‘Site restoration’
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Environment Information

PHP version
n/a
CMS Type
Other
CMS Version
n/a
Backup Tool Version
n/a
Kickstart version
n/a

Latest post by on Thursday, 12 March 2020 18:17 CDT

jciconsult
I hit errors reloading f0f30 Screen shot attached.

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager
Your problem is actually unrelated to FOF. The screenshot you sent me shows Kickstart, the backup extraction script, saying that it cannot upload a file. The file happens to belong to FOF but it's not an issue with FOF per se.

A better title for your ticket would be "Backup archive extraction fails close to the beginning with Kickstart saying it cannot upload a file".

Please read this troubleshooter page I've written about it. The passages applicable to your case are those under "Free space" and "File and folder permissions".

Most likely your problem is with free space. Do note that your host may report free space of several GB but at the same time impose a limit on the number of inodes you can use. An inode is, to put it simply, the smallest chunk of disk you can use on a filesystem. Every file and every directory uses a number of inodes proportional to its size. Linux, the operating system your server uses, can be set up to have a massive disk space allowance for your user but at the same time a meager inode allowance which heavily restricts the maximum disk space your files can use. What we usually see is clients hitting their inode limit (an obscure metric they might have not even noticed exists in their control panel) while their prominently displayed "free space" metric shows a few GB of space left.

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!

jciconsult
Disk space was NOT the issue. I was doing this in XAMPP under windows 10 on a system with a large hard drive there is 400gig available on the drive.
File permissions may be the issue. I adjusted those in the library folder. However, it may be more subtle. My target folder is on D. I tried your standalone extractor and it failed because it could not change drive C when it reached the critical point.

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager
My target folder is on D. I tried your standalone extractor and it failed because it could not change drive C when it reached the critical point.


I am confused. Are you extracting on D: or C:? In any case Kickstart will always extract on the same folder the archive is placed in. It has no reason to magically switch to a different folder nor does it do that under any circumstances.

Sorry, what you write makes no sense.

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!

jciconsult
I have attached the messages. The first page shows the setup for the standalone The second page shows the message.
Note the C:\ below the green bar on the main screen.

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager
Oh, by "standalone" you meant Akeeba eXtract Wizard but we have discontinued it a long time ago.

However, it's not trying to switch to C:\ (note the backslash). It is failing to extract a file called C:/ (note the forward slash). That's because in the root of your site on your Linux server you have a file or folder literally called "C:/" which is a valid name in Linux but invalid on Windows. Most likely you tried extracting a ZIP file you created on Windows using cPanel's File Manager, hence the weird result you are getting.

However, this has nothing to do with Kickstart. So let's forget your last two posts for a minute.

Which local server are you using? XAMPP? WAMPserver? MAMP? There is a VERY good reason I am asking and has to do with really bad decisions each of these local server developers has made which make them occasionally bomb out. Knowing which one you are using will help me tell you what to do to work around their problems.

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!

jciconsult
I am using XAMPP. I am sorry. I thought that I had mentioned it.

nicholas
Akeeba Staff
Manager
You actually told me. I think my coffee was too weak yesterday – sorry!

Well, that explains it. XAMPP has made the same mistake I made in 2017 and it took me 6 months to figure out despite two decades of experience in setting up (Linux) development servers: they are using the non-thread-safe PHP module for Apache. However, they are also using an Apache MPM which is threaded. This creates memory consistency issues and PHP crashes.

XAMPP has been doing that since its inception. The memory corruption issues are very sensitive to the timing of the requests. For the better part of the past two decades computers were slow enough to make it virtually impossible to get requests fast enough to trigger this memory corruption so this issue flew under the radar.

As I said, timing is everything. Kickstart DOES have the option to set up timing settings to work around this issue. Before you click on the green Start button scroll down to the "Fine tune" section. Set the following:
  • Minimum execution time: 5
  • Maximum execution time: 1

Yes, the maximum is lower than the minimum. These are very conservative settings which should work in pretty much all cases. What we do here is create a 20% duty cycle. We have Kickstart work for 1 second and sit there doing nothing for 4 seconds. This adds enough time between requests for Apache to avoid creating a new PHP thread, preventing the memory corruption issue from occurring. The downside is that it takes 5 times longer to extract the backup archive.

You could also try the settings minimum 7 / maximum 4 or minimum 5 / maximum 5 as well. These are a bit more precarious solutions but significantly faster.

Please let me know your results and which timing settings you used. I am collecting this information to make them the default settings for Kickstart on Windows computers.

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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