XF 1.5 Importing from phpbb3

[Dan Allen]

Is there a best importer to use for pulling into XF from phpbb3? We have about 100,000 posts, 9,000 threads, 3,000 people registered, 132 forums.

 

[Paul B]

There is a built in phpBB 3.0 importer.

 

[Dan Allen]

Thank you, I found it right away with that tip.

I don't know if you can help with this question. While the import is running on the remote server, why is the progress monitor on my PC (macbookPro) CPU having to work so hard? The system is being slowed down and its temperature is rising to a dangerous level. Why is that? I have noticed that pages running javascript animation will cause this, so this is not at all unique to XF. I am just wondering if you have any insight or fix for this.

 

[Jake Bunce]

Ignoring the fact that browsers suck and Macs have poor cooling systems...

I am running a test import right now and my browser is pulling an extra 15% CPU from baseline. I am using Chrome on my Macbook.

My experience with recent versions of FF is that it has performance issues. I have to relaunch the entire application at least every few days to avoid increasingly slow performance. Chrome is better in my experience.

 

[Dan Allen]

Ignoring the fact that browsers suck and Macs have poor cooling systems...

Roger that, and I appreciate the tip regarding FF's performance problem and Chrome being better. I got onto FF quit awhile ago, and all the benefits have been met or overtaken by other browsers. My problem with Google is their massive UNREPORTED income, which normally is a crime for a public company, they get from Uncle Sam to help the stupid and dangerous tracking of everyone's communications. Prior to Edward Snowden, a statement like that was speculative, now, it's only impolite. It's truth is unmistakable even if it can be denied, due to awkwardness of bringing it up. The money is unreported, because the anti-terrorists laws make it a crime to disclose when Uncle Sam makes an offer that cannot be refused to help him eaves drop, an offer made quite palatable by the fact that payment is with a blank check signed by the government handed over to the company to justify in terms that are not exposed to public scrutiny. 1% of that momey invested in Xenforo would do the world wonders. Come to think of it, I would be a little surprised if security services did not have their hands in XF's pants at least a little. May they get everything you could give them already, through their copy of all internet traffic they stream into their data centers, where back door keys to rsa and ssl encryption are ready to do their work. It's how Google pays for all that unlimited disk space, how generous it seem for them to do that, until we had proof of why they do it of them. The relevance here is I am loathe to support them by using their browser. But maybe I will relent

Politics Aside, Why Is the Import So SLOW?
But FF and Mac tech issues don't explain the why the the browser needs to pull any power for a job happening on a server. Ajax can send a progress update every five seconds and he load is next to nothing. Someday, I am going to find where that power is being wasted, because surely it is being wasted, right? The data conversion is not sending all the data to my mac. All the work is on the server so the PC doesn't need to be loaded more than with small ajax updates. Here is my guess. Updates to the PC are too frequent. The easy fix would be to make it configurable. That is only a guess, so until I have proof, I won't give words to my belief that this is a bug in the importer.

One more thing I am going to find out and if someone can just tell me, that would be great. Why does this import run slower pulling a brick factory's lorry up a hill? I am not trying to give nyone a hard time, but seriously, this things runs like 0.1% 0.2% progress increments for a long.or alonggggggggggg time. come back in an hour. So while it teams with FF to wreck my PC by pulling too power, it doesn't even go fast when it takes all that power.

As a reference, when we ported into phpbb3 this time last year, the scripts took awhile to write, but when they ran, they did 90% the volume we have now, and those scripts were done in less than 20 seconds. Unless the volume of data in hundreds of millions of records, there is never a reason for a conversion to take more than a few minutes. So what is up with that?

Please tell me the bottleneck is not sending a copy of the data to uncle sam and he has to get his copy before we get our conversion.

 

[Amaury]

My experience with recent versions of FF is that it has performance issues. I have to relaunch the entire application at least every few days to avoid increasingly slow performance. Chrome is better in my experience.

It's the other way around for me. :x

Chrome has RAM issues. Basically, if I leave it idle for a long time--so long that the monitor has gone to sleep--and come back to it later, all the tabs, and the browser, for that matter, freeze and it takes a while for them to respond again. This doesn't happen with Firefox.

 

[Dan Allen]

It's the other way around for me. :x

Chrome has RAM issues. Basically, if I leave it idle for a long time--so long that the monitor has gone to sleep--and come back to it later, all the tabs, and the browser, for that matter, freeze and it takes a while for them to respond again. This doesn't happen with Firefox.

Spyware

 

[Amaury]

?

Spyware has nothing to do with this.

 

[Dan Allen]

Ok, I don't know what causes the Chome to freeze. I was suggesting that maybe Chrome is spyware, pulling resources into that instead of keeping the browser going. I really don't know I am sure that is wrong/

 

[Jake Bunce]

How many posts?

The % progress indicator isn't strictly accurate. It uses the current and max post id to get a percentage. An accurate percentage would involve counting the number of records but that would come at a performance hit, so XenForo uses the ids which is a good approximation. However, gaps in the set of ids will cause the progress percentage to be increasingly wrong. For example, if your source ids go from 1 - 100 and then from 900 - 1000 then the progress will jump from 10% to 90% in the middle.

It might be relevant...

 

[Dan Allen]

How many posts?

Thank you for explain how the progress meter works. What I don't understand why the whole conversion takes more than about 20 seconds.

I also don't understand why the progress meter hammers the cpu.
The % progress indicator isn't strictly accurate. It uses the current and max post id to get a percentage. An accurate percentage would involve counting the number of records but that would come at a performance hit, so XenForo uses the ids which is a good approximation. However, gaps in the set of ids will cause the progress percentage to be increasingly wrong. For example, if your source ids go from 1 - 100 and then from 900 - 1000 then the progress will jump from 10% to 90% in the middle.

It might be relevant...

Thank you for explaining the progress meter.

About 100,000 posts.

 

[Jake Bunce]

100k posts isn't too bad. I would guesstimate that would take no more than 20-30 minutes on average. If it's taking much longer then your server might have poor performance. You also spoke of client issues. I see nothing special about XF's client scripting that can be blamed for a CPU-hungry browser, but of course if the client browser is slow to process the import page then that can also be why it's taking so long.