[gerryvz]

Hi Giovanni,

Thank you for your responses. Rarely is a developer so responsive and engaged, particularly so many years after creating the code. For that, I thank you.

I solved the problem of my image downloads stopping, and I hope this solution is helpful for other people.

What I found is that the database is timing out, because the image downloader is waiting for hosts that once had images that were posted in forum posts, that are not responding or no longer have the images on them.

What I do is to run the image downloader code manually from the vBulletin Administrative control panel, in the "Scheduled Task Manager" panel, hitting the "Run Now" button.

This forces your image downloader code to run manually (in between the 10-minute cron job period). The downloader code will run until it encounters an unresponsive host, and times out. There will be a database error (like I showed in the text I posted previously...you see the URL with the "charlesironside" text in it) that shows the host URL where the timeout occurred.

I note this in the database error, and then I add this host (not the entire URL, just the "www.xxxxx.com" portion or equivalent) to the "Ignore" list.

After adding the unresponsive host to the Ignore list, then I restart the image downloader manually (as above)...or wait for the cron job to start it again. It will automatically begin the downloading of the images, until it hits another unresponsive host.

I check on the downloading every couple of hours. If via my FTP program, I see that there have been no images downloaded for at least 30 minutes, then I run the code manually until I receive another database error. Then I add the offending host to the Ignore list, and start the process again.

So, what it comes down to, is hosts that are now off-line or otherwise unresponsive in posts made years ago.

This won't be an issue going forward (after all past posts' images are downloaded) because of the ongoing cron job, which will download external images from all future posts regularly -- before the hosts go off-line or otherwise become unresponsive.

I hope this makes sense, and I think it is probably the cause of many other peoples' problems with the image downloader abruptly stopping. The solution has worked for me and allowed me to "catch up" on the downloading for all of my past posts.

Regards,
Gerry