Google Calendar ICS Scheduled Imports Hung on "Import Pending"

[Andras]

This reply is private.

[Justin]

Have you tested this with a cron job and wp-cron disabled?

My copy of the site would run the import script mostly successfully and the only difference was that on the live site I have wp-cron disabled and run a cron job every 5 minutes to trigger it.

Our live site still has issue with the import, I re-enabled it yesterday and every scheduled import since then has a status of “Import Pending”.

[Andras]

Hey Justin,

No, I haven’t tried a real cron yet. Based on talks with a developer a real cron should work better than the wp-cron.

Some more information that might be useful in this case:

When a scheduled import runs, the status of the import will be ‘Pending’ until the last event from that source is fetched.

The 5 minute cron will basically ping the EA server every 5 minutes to ask about the status. If not all events are imported yet and transferred to your site, then it will stay pending. But your daily (or hourly) import schedule will not be affected by this. If an import is scheduled for hourly, then the 5 minute cron does not change that, a new import request will still be sent only every hour. And that is good so.

If a new schedule of the same feed starts before the previous finishes, then the previous one will never finish and will be stuck in ‘Pending’ status. (We will be looking into how to remedy this.) This happens if there are too many events in the feed. What you can do in this case is to decrease the schedule time of the import.

Also what might help is increasing the frequency of your ‘real’ cron from 5 minutes to fire a bit more often and see if that help.

On the feeds that are pending for long: there is a garbage collection routine implemented and pending imports that are older than 4 hours or so are purged, a couple of them at a time.

Also what can happen is that the feed gets a timeout. If you are requesting for example a Facebook feed too often, then Facebook might reply that ‘Sorry dude, now you need to wait a bit’. This is beyond our control.

If I remember correctly than you have a lot of feeds that you are importing. That can also influence things.

One other factor is the hosting resources.

What I would recommend for now is – and you can choose if you try all at once or add them one-by-one:

• Set the import schedule times to less frequent. If they are on hourly, then set them to daily. This can result in the imports finishing before a new scheduled import is fired.
• Increase the frequency of your cron from 5 minutes to 1-2 minutes.
• Set up a low import limit under Events > Settings >  Imports tab > Global Import Settings section
• Optionally set most of the feeds to ‘On demand’ import and leave only 1-2 on schedule to see if that changes anything.

I’m sorry that this is taking so long to resolve. There are too many influencing factors which makes is a very complex issue. Nonetheless we’re here to help you get this fixed.

Looking forward to hearing the results.

Cheers,
Andras

[Justin]

We only have one import coming from google calendars, and you can see from screenshot this is only updating 22 events and manual imports work fine so I don’t think this is a timeout issue.

Also, each import with a status of Import Pending shows 0 in the imported column, but a manual import shows “0 new 22 updated”. I was going to screenshot this however after running the manual import all the imports with a status of Import Pending were cleared out.

[Andras]

Hi Justin,

imports with a status of Import Pending were cleared out

That’s some good news.

We have also pushed an update on Event Aggregator.

At the moment I don’t have anything else new. Let’s see if these 2 events have any effect over the weekend. Could you give me an update on Monday? And we’ll see how we can move forward from there.

Thanks and have a great weekend,

Andras

[Justin]

This reply is private.

[Andras]

This reply is private.

[Justin]

I changed it to the new license and there was, unfortunately, no change.

I will look into using the version that was working, but where can I get old versions to download?

[Andras]

Hi,

You can find the old versions in the .org repo as well. You need to switch to ‘Advanced View’ which is in the right sidebar.

Here’s a direct link:

The Events Calendar

For ECPro you need to log into your account here and go to your downloads page.

Andras

[Justin]

I haven’t been able to find the combination of older version yet that worked.

Have you heard anything from the developer working on this bug?

[Andras]

Hello Justin,

A developer has been assigned to this issue yesterday. This is as much information as I am able to give you now. I can give you an update next week.

Thanks for bearing with us.

Cheers,
Andras

[Andras]

Hi Justin

Again, thank you for your patience.

A developer was able to cook up a fix for this issue. It will be released with the upcoming maintenance release in the coming days.

Once it comes out and you updated please check if it solves your issue. I would be happy to hear the results.

Thanks and cheers,
Andras

[Courtney]

We released an update for this issue. Can you update your plugins (preferrably on a staging site) and see if that resolves the issue.

https://theeventscalendar.com/maintenance-release-week-13-november-2017/

Thanks
Courtney ?

[Support Droid]

Hey there! This thread has been pretty quiet for the last three weeks, so we’re going to go ahead and close it to avoid confusion with other topics. If you’re still looking for help with this, please do open a new thread, reference this one and we’d be more than happy to continue the conversation over there.

Thanks so much!
The Events Calendar Support Team

[Author]

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