It rolls of the tongue like I’m trying to curse in Cantonese, Jinzora! I was cursing the Jinz for the better part of the day as I attempted a clean upgrade from 2.0.1 to 2.3.7. Sure, it started out fine until the performance of the main page began sucking wind like a four pack a day, McDonald’s eating fool running a Turkey Day 5k. Being Jimmy-Too-Smart I decided the best thing would be to upgrade to the nightly build as it was supposed to address those very performance issues. Yeah.

In my infinite wisdom I figured a clean install would be the best bet so I cleaned out the old install, leaving the database intact as the installer gives the option to drop and re-create the tables. Perfect, right? Yeah. What ended up happening is that the installation choked when trying to re-create the tables, dropped them fine then just hit a wall. No big deal, I figure I can just SSH in and suck the jinzora.sql file in by hand and then start the install process over skipping the database part. Yeah.

So the jinzora.sql file had some issues. Turns out that MySQL didn’t like the DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 syntax in the slightest. Didn’t even like the syntax recommended in the MySQL user guide, something like DEFAULT CHARACTER SET = latin2. No problem, just replace all instances of DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1 with nothing. Sucked in without any belly aching. Back to the install wizard and I’ll be streaming tunes in no time. Yeah.

Next problem is that the Jinzora index file won’t load nor will it error out, and yes I deleted the install.lock file. It just spins and spins and spins. Checking ps -aux shows that several Apache threads were spawned when I hit the page. Canceling the page load makes no difference. Restarting Apache seems to fix it except that hitting the page produces the same result. I opt at this point to walk away and get something to drink. Well, at least something thirst quenching.

Surprise! When I get back the index page loads fine and the install wizard comes up and I breeze through the options, making it successfully to the media import stage.  So far so good as the wizard analyzes the directory and cheerfully tells me that there are 20267 files and the import will take approximately 32 minutes.  Great!  33 minutes later I’m staring at the page reporting that 20267 files have been imported and it is 99% complete. Great! Hmm, wait should the page still be loading?

Choked.  Now, I’ve got the repeat the steps of the last couple of paragraphs and this time I only import a small directory with some 78 files.  After that I can get in and rescan the remaining media which goes off without a hitch except for the fact that live update with a collection greater than 100 is like watching ice sheets retreat in January.  Easiest fix is to stop the page from loading, drop back to the shell and set live update to false, and when I hit the page again zing there it is.  From start to finish, some 6 hours.

And that, folks, is how not to upgrade your Jinzora install.