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Unable to import pages to enwiki
Open, Needs TriagePublicPRODUCTION ERROR

Description

Steps to replicate the issue (include links if applicable):

  • Go to Special:Import
  • Attempt an import, either transwiki or xmlupload

What happens?:

  • FAIL with error, "Our servers are currently under maintenance or experiencing a technical issue"

What should have happened instead?:

  • Import should complete

Software version (on Special:Version page; skip for WMF-hosted wikis like Wikipedia):
WMF PROD

Other information (browser name/version, screenshots, etc.):

Error Details:
Our servers are currently under maintenance or experiencing a technical issue

If you report this error to the Wikimedia System Administrators, please include the details below.

Request served via cp1106 cp1106, Varnish XID 893852457
Error: 503, Backend fetch failed at Tue, 03 Jun 2025 13:19:10 GMT

Event Timeline

Restricted Application changed the subtype of this task from "Bug Report" to "Production Error". · View Herald TranscriptJun 3 2025, 1:20 PM
Restricted Application added a subscriber: Aklapper. · View Herald Transcript

Note: same exported XML files WORKED as expected when importing to testwiki:
https://test.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ALog&logid=426920

It was almost certainly a file size issue (the relevant XML files are 18,015KB and 11,650 KB, respectively), the former being the largest file I've ever imported on Wikipedia. For what it's worth I got both those imports to work, but they took a while (I had the importing page opened for several minutes each time) and I also got a Wikimedia error.

I just tried a much smaller import from the August 2001 database dump at Letterboxing (hobby), and it worked completely as expected.

I've therefore marked this task as resolved.

As I noted ,the same process worked on testwiki, so this seems like an actual production processing error (likely some sort of timeout). If the root cause is "filesize" - then there is still a problem: the failure error is incorrect.

OK, re-opened it (marking it as resolved was probably beyond my purview here). But to me this is a normal failure mode for things that fail due to too much info being asked for ... like resource-hungry contributions queries ... and, back in the old days, resource-hungry deletion/undeletion requests (which are now dealt with by the replication lag trigger and the 500-edits-at-a-time thing in Special:Undelete). Have I just spent way too much time abusing the poor old servers?

I ran into repeated import timeouts when running https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Flow_cleanup_bot. But I was importing pages even larger than that, and found about 40MB to be the sweet spot when importing things there - any larger would end up failing.

I would be inclined to close this as a duplicate of T384167

T384167 seems like a proposed solution, this is the report of an actual production error. AFAIK, no one has yet investigated this actual production error - which can then be associated with a bug/defect - or become the report of the defect. This has been going on for a long time without being addressed.