Service Unavailable

[Trebek]

When I am updating large amounts of people I occasionally get the error "http/1.1 503 service unavailable".  Is there something I am doing wrong or possibly away around it?  Thank you for all the help.

[rick.ca]

I believe the error can happen for different reasons. I've had it result from being banned by Google for doing too many IMPAwards queries. I suppose it's possible IMDb is doing the same thing to you, but I doubt it if it's only happening occasionally. Are you using Silent Mode (set at the foot of Preferences - Plugins)? That may help—in that it at least may not interrupt a mass update. There are also the advanced Internet Connection settings, but I have no idea if doing something like increasing a timeout setting would have any impact on this.

[Trebek]

I will definitely try the silent mode.  It is something that I had not even noticed before so we will see how that works.  Thank you for the timely response and suggestions.

[mgpw4me@yahoo.com]

Increasing the timeout does help, but the 503 will still come up on large updates...for me it's about 3% when I do more than 30 movies...and the percentage rises up to 10% for several hundred updates.  Once the error occurs, the odds are that the next 1 or 2 records will also fail.

I've noted that when you go to IMDB while doing an update, you're likely to get a message about too many requests from your IP.  This may or may not be related, but I suppose this might be the cause of the problem.  If IMDB sends a completion header, but the server doesn't run quickly enough to update internally, a second request might fail based on the completion status on the server.

I know this has been discussed before, and the internet options (advanced) settings were added in response, but there doesn't appear to be a configurable wait time between requests (only necessary, I think after an error).

Silent mode does hide the errors, but then you have to find the errors somehow and re-run the updates.  The advanced search for movies (url not containing imdb) catches many of the failures.  People come up as hidden records when added from the movie script, and only become visible after the record has been updated, so filtering on "not visible" works.  Your mileage may vary.

[rick.ca]

Silent mode does hide the errors, but then you have to find the errors somehow and re-run the updates.

I suppose this is what I've become used to. I use your transname PHP script (and do not download transname). Sorting by transname then leaves all newly added records at the top of the list. When I feel it's time for an update, I just select and update those records (with Silent Mode on), and then run the script. That routine must be causing me to miss any records that might have been skipped due to this issue. But with 31,000 records, how am I going to notice? I do occasionally check for records with no Career—which seems to be reliable way of finding records that have not been updated—but I don't recall finding any missed records that way since I've been doing this. Maybe I'm updating often enough my batches are small and don't trigger the error.

People come up as hidden records when added from the movie script, and only become visible after the record has been updated, so filtering on "not visible" works.

If Show people added from movies credits is set, then all people are visible. But grouping by Career works just as well.