Prevent terminated migrations
in progress
D
Dan Lam
Have another one that failed. Original host is Bluehost.
Kevin Hoffman
Dan Lam: Regarding the CSS in the
uploads/pp/static
directory, is that a cached CSS file that is generated by your plugin? If so, do you know how often those files are created and deleted?The reason I ask is because this error may occur if the CSS file existed at the start of the migration but was not found when it came time to transfer it.
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Dan Lam
Kevin Hoffman Okay yes, that is a CSS file generated by our theme. They get generated whenever a user makes modifications and saves. Interesting to note that if the file existed at the beginning of the migration, but is not there later, it could cause issues. I'll let our team know. Thank you.
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Benjamin Tennant
Gosh I can't get this new plugin to work. One day stalled, one day it fails. Here's todays version. Why am I doing user testing? Shouldn't there be a testing phase for this rollout internally?
Kevin Hoffman
Benjamin Tennant: I'm sorry to hear this but grateful for your continued feedback. Our team is looking at every piece of feedback you're providing and digging into migration logs to see where we can improve. I realize when your migrations are failing, the rest of the picture doesn't really matter, but I do want to give you some insight into the development and testing of the plugin.
We held an internal Alpha test from August–September 2023 which included migrations from multiple hosts. At the end of September, we began rolling out a phased Beta to new cohorts of customers as performance improved. Over the past four months, the new plugin has completed over 8,000 migrations. Just yesterday the latest version of the plugin processed over 200 unique migrations with a 90% completion rate. With that said, there is still work to be done to improve reliability as we continue to account for the vast landscape of WordPress hosts, themes, and plugins that can affect migrations.
At the end of the day, your feedback is invaluable to us, but we also want to get your sites moved as efficiently as possible without you feeling like a user tester. If you need to use the legacy plugin while it is still available, please do so. We're going to keep working to improve the WP Engine Site Migration plugin and your experience going forward.
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Benjamin Tennant
Kevin Hoffman thanks for the information. That's helpful. Do you want us to continue sharing failed migration on this ticket or in another method? One failed for me overnight at 99%. Then a retry failed today at 73%. I guess I can try doing some exclusions in a custom migration. But it feels kind of like guessing as to what the problem would be.
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Benjamin Tennant
Feeback on this. Unchecking the "other files" option in the migration solved the issue. There wasn't anything there important - Wordfence logs, cache and stuff like that.
Kevin Hoffman
Benjamin Tennant: Thanks for following up. I'm glad you got the migration to complete but would still like to dig into this to see if we can improve the plugin for next time. To answer your question about whether it's helpful to report errors here, it is most helpful when we can access the source site and run a test migration to our development server. Would you be open to sharing admin access to the source site? If so, I can send you an email.
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Benjamin Tennant
Kevin Hoffman yes, that would be ok. I'll look for that email.
Kevin Hoffman
Benjamin Tennant Thanks, I've followed up with you and Dan Lam via email.
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Mario Yepes
Thank you for taking care of this. I'll re-post on this thread if I see the error again
Kevin Hoffman
in progress
The latest release of WP Engine Site Migration 1.0.0-beta.22 improves the chunking of large media files which we believe were the primary cause of terminated migrations. After 450 migrations using the latest release, we have not seen a single terminated migration yet.
If you have experienced this error in the past, we'd greatly appreciate you trying again with the latest release and sharing the result.
Kevin Hoffman
under review
While we are still investigating this issue, one cause appears to be large media files which require chunking across multiple requests. If you encounter this error during the Media Uploads stage, one workaround is to customize the migration and uncheck Media Uploads OR exclude specific large file types in the Media Uploads panel (e.g.
*.mp4
). We recognize excluding files is not the ideal solution, but in some cases a partial migration may be preferable to a failed migration.Kevin Hoffman
Mario Yepes Thank you for the feedback. I'm the product manager of the WP Engine Site Migration plugin. We're actively investigating the cause of these terminated migrations, which appears to be large media files.
This behavior which automatically terminates the migration after 4 minutes without progress was added because we noticed a small percentage of migrations were stalling without resolution. Rather than leave you waiting for hours without progress, we decided it would be better to terminate the migration once it becomes clear that it is unlikely to succeed. This allows you to request support or move on to an alternative migration method more quickly. In that sense, this behavior is a catch-all for when we cannot otherwise surface a specific error.
I hear your feedback about adding more information to assist with troubleshooting, and I agree we could do more to point you in the right direction.