[Phpgedview-talk] Bugs 3.3 install

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John,

A week or so ago you offered me some additional gedcom cleanup routines. I 
am interested in having them. Please send them to me off-list.

I wanted to take this opportunity to describe the adventure I had trying to 
install and upload a large gedcom. Maybe my experience will help someone 
else and maybe it will help suggest ways to make the process easier. Maybe 
someone will tell me something I did wrong that will make the next time 
much easier!
__________

I have finally succeeded in installing 3.3 and using it. I am quite 
impressed with what it can do. But I have to tell you that it was a major 
struggle to install one of my large (c. 20 MB) gedcoms. I was continually 
fighting limits.

IMHO, it is imperative to find a way to upload a large gedcom to a MySQL 
database without having to change standard php limits.

Here is what I found I needed to do when phpGedView timed out trying to 
import my gedcom into MySQL.

1/ I installed EasyPHP 1.8 from easyphp.org on my Windows XP Home PC. This 
is a combo package that includes apache, php, mysql, and phpmyadmin. I am 
not going to say that making it work was easy. Their web site is mostly in 
French... I found that I needed to re-boot and stop/start servers to get it 
to work. I edited the php.ini to increase limits.

2/ I copied 3.3 into my localhost folder and moved the gedcom.

Sidebar: I would really like to see the config file have a way to point to 
the where the code lives so the code and folders that do not need to change 
or have permissions change, etc. can sit anywhere.

One of the things I saw from this exercise is that I wanted to put 
different gedcoms in different MySQL databases. In part, this was going to 
be because I would want to dump them individually. In part, to be able to 
retain some separation. And as the software SEEMS to be configurable, each 
MySQL database now requires its own copy of all of the code.

3/ I configured the database, configured the gedcom, validated the gedcom, 
and imported the gedcom into my local MySQL database. This took FOREVER. 
First, I needed to increase the timeout limit on the gedcom. I started by 
increasing from 60 to 600 seconds. This barely got me through the first 
pass of the import where it does names. Then it went to the second pass and 
ran out of time doing places. I increased it again to 1800 seconds. And it 
barely made it on that pass but then crashed in the last pass where it load 
the married names. I finally needed to increase it to 4800 seconds to make 
it through the last pass.

In each case, it had to re-run the passes that it had successfully done 
before. A valuable enhancement would be to make it possible to re-run 
starting where you left off. Another would be to ignore time limit while 
importing a gedcom.

I have difficulty understanding 2 performance issues - why does this 
process take so long? I have a quick enough little PC.

and why did each go around on the same pass take less time? The first time 
I did pass one it took about 630 seconds. The 4th time it was just over 500 
seconds. Same data. Same PC. Nothing else running on the PC at the time. 
Bizarre...

4/ OK. Now I have my GEDCOM in a phpGedView MySQL database. I then went 
into phpMyAdmin and dumped the database into a gzipped SQL file to 
re-import through phpMyAdmin into my MySQL database on my host. Export was 
easy. Import was a bear!

Of course, my server at hosting company timed out trying to upload and 
unzip and process a 56 MB SQL file. (about 7+ MB compressed). I then 
exported the tables individually (I did combine the small tables into one 
export...) and then pasting the SQL into the SQL window a bit at a time, I 
was able to process all of the SQL. But even that was not a small task. (My 
placelinks table was about 225K records that I pasted in 25K records at a 
time.)

In the end, it is working... I think ... but I will need to go through the 
whole process again once I get a routine that will fix the FTM prefix 
titles. (FTM title becomes an event. It should be a 2 NPFX tag under the 
person's name rather than a 1 TITL event tag.) (Of course, if someone knows 
a clever SQL query that I can run on the database to change this, please 
advise...)