RPGnet Woes

[shannon_a]

Upgrade processes just never work like they should.

This afternoon I decided to go ahead and do the upgrade of RPGnet's forums from v2 to v3 of vBulletin; it's something I've been wanting to do for about a month, with the hope that it'll help deal with some of the efficiency problems that seem to be implicit in using vBulletin on a large site.

I figured 2-3 hours would do the job. Ha.

In order, the problems were:

• IE permanently hung during the 16th or so step of the upgrade process.
  
• When restarted, the vBulletin upgrade process couldn't make things work. (It's supposed to seamlessly keep going after a crash.)
  
• After reading the code and leading the upgrade process through step 16 by the hand, it then got all the way to step 42 (a while later) and crashed again.
  
• The upgrade didn't work.
  
• At this point, when I decided to restore from the backup I'd made before the upgrade, the restore failed about 30 minutes in.
  
• And did it again a second time.
  
• When I told the restore process to ignore the minor error that was crashing it, it spent about 3-4 hours restoring all the tables, from a-s, including the 2 million entry "post" table and the 30 million entry "searchindex" table. Then it died because my ISP helpfully cut my connection which clearly wasn't being used.
  
• I'm now three hours into my second 3-4 hour restore, with some data hitting my ISP every 30 seconds so that they don't cut my connection and ruin my restore again.
  

Sigh.

At this point I'm just hoping to get things back into the state they were before I started. Completing this restore and tweaking things a bit will hopefully do that. Then, tomorrow I can try again.

This time, however, I know:

1. Don't run the process from an unreliable IE browser.
   
2. Delete the "searchindex" results first, since they're something like 83% of the database.
   
3. Start earlier.