Topic on Project:Support desk

Ciciban (talkcontribs)

Dear All,

I have another problem pretty similar to this one:

here there is a template intro. I employed it e.g. here with the argument value 2.4. It produces a flag and a link to Category:Intro/2.4 (that should in the end be hidden).

Why does Category:Intro/2.4 remain empty?

Thank you in advance for your help.

AhmadF.Cheema (talkcontribs)
192.69.65.16 (talkcontribs)

I have been having this problem for years, running the jobs does not solve the problem, setting $wgRunJobsAsync to false doesn't solve the problem, truncating the jobs table doesn't solve the problem, and running maintenance/refreshLinks.php not only doesn't help, it unlists articles that were already correctly listed on category pages, making the problem worse.

I'm dealing with that right now and none of the advice works for it. 1.27, 1.29, 1.30, 1.31, doesn't matter

192.69.65.16 (talkcontribs)

in fact the only thing that DOES work is to stop applying categories via templates and write them manually into every page, which defeats a pretty big part of the reason why we want to use MW at all.

we're still on MySQL, not MariaDB, and probably won't ever get actual support for this issue. PHP 7.0, ubuntu 16.04 and 18.04, doesn't matter. wikimedia left us in the dirt

Ciencia Al Poder (talkcontribs)

If refreshLinks.php doesn't work, then you have a problem with one of the extensions, that's causing errors when parsing the categories and inserting them in the tracking tables. Disable all extensions and try again. Manual:How to debug gives hints about how to see error messages that may normally be hidden for security reasons on a production server

Bawolff (talkcontribs)

> we're still on MySQL, not MariaDB, and probably won't ever get actual support for this issue. PHP 7.0, ubuntu 16.04 and 18.04, doesn't matter. wikimedia left us in the dirt

MySQL is still supported, and what you are describing does not sound like a db issue, so I doubt its related to your use of mysql.

You should check your php error log of course to see if there are any errors in it. You should also run the runJobs.php maintenance script, and see what it outputs, if there is an error it will likely output what it is

> truncating the jobs table doesn't solve the problem

Deleting the jobs table definitely is not going to solve the problem. It might create the problem, but its not going to solve it.

> $wgRunJobsAsync to false doesn't solve the problem

This can sometimes help, depending on what the root cause is. Even if it did help, it won't help immediately unless you clear the backlog by running runJobs.php.

As something to test, try putting the following in the bottom of LocalSettings.php

$wgJobRunRate = 25;
$wgRunJobsAsync = false;

This will slow your wiki down quite a bit, so its more just something to try in order to debug. It also may not take affect immediately, so you might have to wait a couple edits before it works (Say about 35 edits).

Ciciban (talkcontribs)

In our wiki we could solve the problem by running RefreshLinks.php by hand – shouldn't that run regularly by default?
Yours, Ciciban (talk) 11:50, 19 October 2018 (UTC)

Ciencia Al Poder (talkcontribs)

This is handled automatically by the Job queue. By default, it may take several page loads to populate the category, depending on the number of pending jobs. The recommended way is to run runJobs.php in a cron job or service.

Ciciban (talkcontribs)