How long the 2.3.6 to 3.0 upgrade process takes

[James Ford]

An hour ago I started a test upgrade of an IPB forum of mine from 2.3.6 to 3.0b4.

The forum has around 1.5 million posts and 0.5 million PMs.

It seems to be taking around a minute to convert 200 PMs to conversations.

That means the PM conversions should take around 2 days in total. Ugh. I wasn't expecting that.

After the PM conversions, is there anything else I should expect to take a while?

What about posts and topics, do they all need similarly converting?

I remember when this here IPS company forum was being converted, there was lots of talk of it being slow because of ongoing conversion. And that lasted a week or so.

Should I expect my forum to also take a week to convert?

And does this mean the forum has to be offline all that time? I guess not, seeing as the IPS company forum wasn't offline. But how to do this? How to keep a forum online during the lengthy upgrade process?

[vandango]

Hey,

Just remember that its a BETA and not the final version. Only in the latest builds have they started to test the upgrade script. You should inform IPS about this, hopefully it won't take that long with the final version.

[James Ford]

Well, to partly answer my own question...

I grew impatient with waiting for all the PMs to convert. So I paused the upgrade process, deleted the entire contents of the message_text and message_topics tables, then resumed the upgrade. It went through to completion in a couple of minutes.

So it seems like it's just the PM conversion that takes ages.

I checked the age of the PMs in my archive, and more than half of them are less than 12 months old. So deleting them all on the live server isn't really an option.

Hopefully the conversion of PMs will be much quicker in the final release. I could live with an overnight rebuild that takes, say, four hours. Otherwise, hopefully there'll be a way to convert all those PMs without making the board unavailable to members while doing so.

[Jmiz9000]

In beta 4 you can skip the PM part. You can also run the queries yourself so it doesnt get timed out

[TCWT]

Hopefully, the ssh upgrade script works this time.

[Brian Garcia]

I read from staff that it isn't possible to upgrade from any of the IPB3 betas to the final (could also be RC's).

[James Ford]

I think the staff said you shouldn't count on there being an upgrade path.

It is, however, sometimes possible for certain upgrade routes.

From the Beta 4 release announcement:

There may be no upgrade path between beta versions

You may upgrade from IP.Board 3.0.0 Beta 3, or from any pre-3.0.0 version of IP.Board

I am not counting on being able to upgrade my Beta 4 to any future release.

I just wanted to test upgrading from 2.3.6 to the latest release, in preparation for when the final release comes out, and also to help uncover any bugs.

[Matt]

As has been pointed out: there is a checkbox before the conversion starts allowing you to skip PM conversion and use a supplied command line (shell) script to convert them post-upgrade.

[James Ford]

I must have missed that while upgrading.

Thanks for pointing it out.

I'll keep an eye for next time.

Great news about the shell script too.

Good work.

[Brett B]

As has been pointed out: there is a checkbox before the conversion starts allowing you to skip PM conversion and use a supplied command line (shell) script to convert them post-upgrade.

Would that convert the PMs quicker than they would be converted during the upgrade?

[AtariAge]

As has been pointed out: there is a checkbox before the conversion starts allowing you to skip PM conversion and use a supplied command line (shell) script to convert them post-upgrade.

Do you have to disable the PM functionality while running this script if you choose to convert them post-upgrade? Looks like I have about 300,000 PMs.

..Al

[Brandon D]

I don't think it makes much of a difference on the speed of the conversion itself but it does go significantly faster because you're not going through a bunch of redirect screens (which make up for huge percentage of the time when done via the web interface). The other benefit is you can run the command and let it be.