Import "Please wait..." hang or UI issues

[gwideman]

Questions about why is import unbelievably slow, or alternatively why does the "Please wait" icon appear indefinitely, and how can I tell if the import process is really still running?

This is on 2.1, using the System > Import function.

Details: I created a csv for 4000 products (with additional attributes and custom options -- about 12M), and that passed the import check and then imported fine, taking a few minutes.

But then I revised the data in the csv, and imported again. First time I selected to Update the existing product records. That again passed the check. The import started, the "Please wait" icon appeared.... and after 20 hours was still there.   I closed the page.  The site seemed to function as though data had uploaded, but I'm not sure it's all updated.

I then revised the CSV some more, and did the process again.  This time I selected to Replace the existing products, thinking that might be faster.  But it's now been an hour, and again "Please wait".

So: 

1. Any insight into the extreme slowness? What could I do to make this tractable?

2. How can I tell if import is really still running?

3. If it is still running, can I kill it somehow?

[gwideman · Accepted solution]

So it looks like the endless import was due to import processing running into siteground shared host max_execution_timeout limit which is set to 120 seconds.  So first, obviously not happy that I waited hours for something that died after a couple of minutes and didn't tell me. (Particularly galling is there's no access to basic admin commands like ps on shared host.)

I have split the import into multiple pieces, and each piece now imports in less than a minute. But long term that's a bit ridiculous. There a are numerous manual choice steps in the admin UI import process that we're just not going to carry out reliably if we have to contend with multiple files every time we update products across the board. 

Perhaps this report might just be useful to someone else at some point.

[MG23ENSI]

Here are common steps to check if the import hangs in "Please wait..." :

1. Make sur that indexers mode is set to "UPDATE BY SCHEDULE" if it isn't already. If you have "UPDATE ON SAVE" mode then you'll suffer and it will take too much time because of indexing events triggered on each item save.

2. Check for 500 or 503 response codes. there might be an error (i encountred that once after deleting a category directly from, catalog_category_entity)

3. Check wether the admin session expired while import is still in process (you can expand admin session lifetime from backend to resolve this one)

Hope this helps

[dharake86]

Update by schedule solved the issue. For other people, make sure ningx has the:  client_max_body_size 128M; directive, that you tweak you php.ini files, and most crucially, switch indexer to schedule. Thanks for the help!

[Towering Media]

Hello dharake86,

You need to select update by schedule under system -> index management. You might need to break the file up a bit.