The server responded with a malformed response.

[Anthony D’Arco]

I just tried setting up an .ics file and I received the following error message:

The server responded with a malformed response. Please see the JS console for more information.

I just tried looking through your forums, and I didn’t see anyone with the same error.

[Brook]

Howdy Anthony,

Thanks for detailing the problem. Is it possible you could share the iCal file you are trying to upload? If you could post a link to it in a private reply using the “Set as private reply” box, I would use the file to try and investigate what’s going on.

Cheers!

– Brook

[Anthony D’Arco]

This reply is private.

[Brook]

Thanks for sharing that Anthony, I am giving it a test right now.

[Anthony D’Arco]

Brook,

I just wanted to follow up on this request to see how things were coming.

Thank you,
Anthony

[Amie]

This reply is private.

[Brook]

Howdy Anthony,

Thank you for checking in. I forgot to report back my findings! I am sorry for the delay. I appreciate your patience.

The error in your console was likely this:

Fatal error: Maximum execution time of 30 seconds exceeded

Your ics file contains a little over 5000 events, many of them recurring ones that will thus spawn more than 5000 events in the calendar.

You will likely need to break your ics file up into smaller chunks to import it. I tried simply adjust PHP’s Maximum execution time from 30 seconds which hides this error. But even still the file was simply too large and overwhelmed the site.

If the calendar utility that you are exporting the .ics from allows you to do smaller sets of data, say a couple months worth of events at a time, you might try that. Or if you prefer there command line utilities like this one to break up .ics files into smaller chunks.

I am sorry that you can’t do them all at once. That would be cool. But most website servers are nowhere near powerful enough to handle 5000 events being created at once. We actually have a batch background process for anything more than 10 events, because anything more is pushing it on some servers.

Does that make sense? Are you able to break up the ics file and trying importing the smaller portions one at a time?

Cheers!

– Brook

[Anthony D’Arco]

Brook,

Yes that makes perfect sense. Do you know if there is a way to do this through Google Calendar? Or what if I changed the date range on the import to only do one month at a time?

Also, lets say I get all the events in. Will that cause problems if I try to get it to refresh on a schedule basis (ie. is it going to try to reimport all 5000 events every time or will it only update what’s been changed?)

Thank you,
Anthony

[Brook]

I appreciate your understanding, Anthony.

Google Calendar does allow you to break events up into multiple calendars. It’s essentially a way of categorizing events. If you can really break your events up into calendars then you will basically solve your export problem for now and into the future. As time goes on and you wish to reimport new events, if you’re only importing a few hundred events you should be in the clear. If there is no great way to categorize all those events, perhaps it could be done by date?

Have you ever run thousands of posts or events on a WordPress installation before? It seems like most servers are able to handle a couple thousand with grace. But, once you get much more than that the cheapest hosting packages (~$10/mo) are no longer powerful enough to serve pages without delay. I just want to give you some warning about this.

If our iCal plugin isn’t going to satisfy your needs here please let us know. I realize you are outside of our usual return window for a plugin, but I would still to like to see if we can get you a refund for it. There’s nothing more dissatisfying than purchasing something you can’t use.

Cheers!

– Brook

[Brook]

Amie I just noticed your response. Sorry for missing it earlier. It sounds like you are probably hitting the same issue. Would it be possible to break up some of your events into a different category and export them separately? I notice you have ~50 recurring events. If you separate those into a different Google Calendar and I would not be surprised if you could just import the two files, one file with the one-time events and a separate with recurring.

Your server might also benefit from bumping PHP’s maximum execution time if the above does not work. You do not have nearly as many events as Anthony so it might not choke if you bumped it from 30 seconds to say 120 seconds. I can not personally walk you through how to change that, because if varies from host to host. But if you ask your webhost how to change “PHP’s maximum execution time” they should be able to walk you through changing it from 30 to 120.

If you need further help, would you mind opening a new topic? We would truly love to help. But, we strive to keep our topics here dedicated to one users problem, that way each persons gets our full attention.

Thank you!

• Brook

[Amie]

This reply is private.

[Brook]

This reply is private.

[Anthony D’Arco]

Brook,

Yeah, we have a dedicated servers, so that isn’t an issue. We should have the power. I think its just a matter of getting them in. I think my question is, for .ics imports you can schedule them. If I schedule it to weekly, does it try to reimport the whole thing again, or just what has been changed/updated?

For instance, I get all 5K events in. But then at the end of the day it tries to pull the calendar in again, and 5 events have been added/changed does it:

A. Try to pull all 5K
B. Pull the 5 new/changed events

Let me know.

[Brook]

Yeah, we have a dedicated servers, so that isn’t an issue. We should have the power.

Excellent! I had a feeling you weren’t the average shared hosting setup, but just in case you were…

If I schedule it to weekly, does it try to reimport the whole thing again, or just what has been changed/updated?

Good question. It runs through a bit of a process for each event:

1. Parses the iCal feed building each of the 5k events.
2. It checks each event to see if it exists in the database.
   1. If it doesn’t exist it gets created.
   2. If it does exist and some of the info has changed, it updates the event.
   3. Otherwise it skips the event.

So while it minimizes writing to the database (slow), it still has to parse and double check each event (somewhat fast).

Even still we are interested in some performance improvements the iCal importer. For one thing we would like to batch import events in the background as we currently do when you create a large number of recurring events. Another we are looking into is checking the LAST-MODIFIED field in the iCal file and comparing it against the last import date. Not all iCal files have these, but those exported from Google Calendar do. For those that do it could really help speed up large scheduled imports by cutting down on database queries. But, neither of these improvements is far enough along yet that I could give you an ETA on when they will be ready.

Does that answer your question?

• Brook

[Anthony D’Arco]

Brook,

Thank you for the explanation, and yes I think I understand how I want to approach this from a workflow stand point.

Thank you,
Anthony

[Author]

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