FTP errors

[erin]

We have just upgraded from V8 to V9 and now have to upload the shop again. We have only about 1100 products, but each product has two photos with the section photos this means about 4000 photos. In total 9200 base files. Under V8 when we got an error it restarted from where it left off, however under V9 it seems to forget all that it has sent and you start from scratch again. Considering it takes about 1 hour per 1,000 photos, this is very time consuming. Also most of the photos are already on there from V8 and are not changing, but the upload ignores this too. I have changed the advance settings in the FTP option panel to go for silent running, hoping this will help, the documentation on "keep alive" is not very good,

the default is 30000 milli-seconds, and if you have problems try a number a little less.

how much is should that be?

1) Can V9 be changed to remember what has already been sent - when a failed upload has stopped Actinic.
2) Can V9 have an option to check the hash of JPG files and not upload if the hash is correct?
3) What can you do if you repeatedly get the FTP error message and retry does not work. The only option is to cancel, and start again from scratch.

PS the photos are NOT bigger than they need be, they are uploaded in the resolution/size we need to display them.

PPS
And I had to retry 3-4 times, because when I ran the upload Actinic came up with an error of a file info_1081F.html file was busy or in use. Nothing else using these files, so I am guess that a generator is running in parallel with a checker, and one thread is busying the file for the other thread. Any way after re-running about 4 times (each time the filename was different) the errors went away. Also had to rerun, because twice got the error message that FTP had been disabled, but after closing Actinic and restarting it worked okay.

[I-CC]

Actinic uploads using threaded uploads, i.e. multiple connections to speed the upload. If you are getting FTP disabled messages, sounds like your host might be preventing multiple simulatenous connections, so speak with your host as to whether this is the case, and if so, ask them to lift this for your site if possible.

[jont]

1) Can V9 be changed to remember what has already been sent - when a failed upload has stopped Actinic.

It does for subsequent uploads - the first is seen as new so sends everything to make sure it is all there

2) Can V9 have an option to check the hash of JPG files and not upload if the hash is correct?

It checks the time stamp but as you have imported the ACD and upgraded these are all reset. Again the next time you upload they will not be sent

3) What can you do if you repeatedly get the FTP error message and retry does not work. The only option is to cancel, and start again from scratch.

The latest v9 introduced the multi-thread upload whilst also still checking the files so is vastly quicker. Search the forum as there is a .ZIP file that can be uploaded to the server (if the hosts permit) which speeds this along.

[erin]

So success after a lot of time

The problem with failed uploads, was still there even though it would continue for several hours without a problem. Then a failure, then it would not work. By setting quite mode, this helped no end, although I have to sit and monitor the connection and reset the ADSL modem about 3 times during the 6 hours of operation, I got it all up.

However the threaded update was a pain, because I set the flag for Catalog Suspended off, and the thread that did the sending finished before the thread that was checking to see if anything needed to be sent. So it would go through the checking and immediately close down. This is not a problem with the ISP or Modem. I found out you can publish the page or set of pages by right clicking on branch in the tree. However this only took off the Catalog Suspended button one each of the product pages, it did not fix this on the generated pages. I tried about 4 times and the upload terminated without sending anything. I sent up two branches (and all sub branches) using the other method (which does not seem to be threaded so works), then went back to publish the whole site. All I could do was to repeat the publish and eventually it reckonised that the whole site needed updating to take off "suspended" and it worked.

By the way I did a site export and site import the way it is described in the upgrade pages, and this just failed. However by copying over site1 folder - this worked, and the upgrade to V9 worked. I know this is not written down, but it got the site published. By the way we employ a designer to apply the web design to Actinic, I do not like the way that you "recommend" that we build the site from scratch for each upgrade.

So there are several ways of doing the upgrade.
1) the preferred option from Actinic in the manual - start again from scratch
2) Export the design and import, and load the products some other way
3) Export the whole site and import the whole site - which I found on Actinic help pages, which I tried and did not work.
4) The unsupported way of doing it copy the site1 directory. However in my case the unsupported method worked and the others were either very expensive or did not work. There surely must be a better way to separate out the design from the inner workings of Actinic to make this easier.

And what I was saying about it remembering. It did remember it if the upload was successful, however as on several occasions I could not get round the FTP error I pressed cancel, and it did not remember. I am sure in older version it did.

When I upgraded from V8 to V9 80% of the photos were the same and already uploaded on the site, but because V9 had a "new" database of what was uploaded, it wanted to re-upload them all again. This cost me about 4-6 hours of wasted time (I had to attend this because of the errors above). In the end the shop was only offline for about 1 day, but it was a close thing. It is great that the upload is now threaded, and this will save time, however I still think there is a bug in there somewhere.

Also errors like "you do not have permission on the ftp server in the cgi-bin" directory, I found out was nothing to do the server, but a missing PL file in site1 (probably because I copied it over). Also somewhere in the upgrade it was trying to execute scripts on the server, before it had upgrade them, thus errors in shop upload.

If there was an accumulated log of what happened during the upload I would happy to send it to you, so you could see for yourself.

Lets make the next upgrade easier.

[cbarling]

Erin, I don't know if your host is an Actinic specialist. If not, it may be worth considering moving to one. Actinic v9 threaded and compressed upload is a complex beast - you will get the best results with a specialist who has all of the bells and whistles that help Actinic installed.

On the redesign on upgrade issue, this is only recommended when going across the v7 to v8 divide, as there is such a massive change in the way that design works between these versions. Subsequent upgrades should be more straight foward.

Chris