The Processing Queued Campaigns window remains blank and doesn’t update current status text only twirling logo and Stop Processing button are visible

Problem: The Processing Queued Campaigns window remains blank and doesn’t update current status text only twirling logo and Stop Processing button are visible. Text appears to flash very briefly then disappears at the end of a run.

Question: Can I fix this in config.php? Is this a problem I can fix or is this a phpList “bug” or is bluehost.com involved?

Background:
phpList V3.2.4
Safari 9.1 [Same issue using Chrome Version 49.0.2623.110]
Mac OS 10.11.4
VPS located at bluehost.com
config.php is basic. NO extended [Still installing and testing. May add extended.php code as necessary.]
All other functions appear to work as expected. [Excruciatingly slow, about 24 msgs./minute and my time is off by 7 hrs. But those are different questions I’ll deal with after I solve this problem.]

Thanks for your help.

What version of PHP is your server running please? I don’t say that’s the issue but the info could be useful for those who are more able to help.

@Richard I think this is a bug in phplist when processing the queue in the browser. The code tries to display progress messages as they occur but isn’t quite right.

See this bug report that I have just raised https://mantis.phplist.org/view.php?id=18072

You can try making the small change to file admin/actions/processqueue.php

insert this line

ob_flush();

immediately before line 418 so that you have

ob_flush;
flush();

But if you are sending any significant number of emails then you should use a cron job to process the queue as it is going to be much more reliable.

Thanks for you response. I mentioned the phpList version in my question under Background, i.e. V3.2.4.

I actually asked about the PHP version, not phpList version which you did give. Still might be useful information.

Thanks for your response. Unfortunately, making this change removed the Processing Queued Campaigns frame and would not allow processing to proceed.

Sorry, I misunderstood.
Version information: 4.0.10.7, latest stable version: 4.6.0

It would appear that I need to upgrade. Not yet sure how to do that but I will. That may be the answer. I’ll get back to you.

phpList won’t work on such an old version of PHP as far as i know, you really need to upgrade to 5.3 or better still 5.4 PHP.
One of my hosts allows me to upgrade to 5.6 and even 7.0 PHP but then my site crashes! Works fine with PHP 5.3 whilst my other host automatically runs 5.5.29 and my sites work fine. So, you’ll need to find which version works best for you.

If your host does not allow you to upgrade from 4.x for yourself, you’ll need to submit a support ticket to request they upgrade to a much more up to date version of PHP, or, consider changing hosts.

Hi Dragonrider:
Bluehost.com http://bluehost.com/ tech support tells me, with explanation, that my cPanel 5.6.29 will only auto update my phpAdmin to 4.0.10.7. I can update phpAdmin on my own without Bluehost.com tech support because I have a VPS. However he cannot guarantee that it will work. This is NOT helpful.

I looked at some docs on upgrading phpAdmin and they look a bit intimidating to me. I do not want to destroy the phpAdmin code because I don’t know what I’m doing. What do you suggest?

Thanks.

No, no, no! Not myphpadmin, the actual version of PHP that your server runs. Should be 5.x where x is 3, 4, 5 or 6

Hi Dragonrider:
My cPanel statistics page shows the following:
cPanel 5.6.29
Apache 5.6.29
PHP 5.10.1
MySQL 5.6.29

Does this seem to be the PHP version number? If so what does it mean?

Thanks.

@Richard That’s okay. Your PHP version seems to be much more up to date than most peoples, although I didn’t know that PHP actually released a 5.10 version. Their site quotes 5.6.20 and the newest version jumps straight to 7.0.x

Hopefully your version won’t affect the running of phpList.

So if everything is up to date then where else do I look to solve the problem of the blank processing window?

Hi duncanc:
I read your bug report. You write Reproducibility - sometimes. I can reproduce this problem every time. As I mentioned before I tried to follow your suggestion and insert the code you recommended. Unfortunately, it stopped the processing cold and caused the processing window to disappear. Did I do something wrong?

@Richard I guess that you made the change incorrectly. Either do it again exactly as I showed in my earlier reply, or revert to the original file and just accept that the window doesn’t display the processing results in a nice way.

But phplist is sending the campaign so there is not an underlying problem.

I’m not sure that the php version is directly relevant to this problem but you haven’t yet identified the version. 5.10 is probably the version of perl, not php.

If all this is unfamiliar to you then you might want to look at using the phplist hosted service www.phplist.com. You would be up and running in 10 minutes.

Hi duncanc:
When I followed your suggestion earlier I used the original processqueue.php file that came within the phplist 3.2.4 downloaded folder. I replaced the processqueue.php file that was on my server. It stopped processing altogether. I tried that procedure again today with and without the insert you suggested. Neither worked. When I looked at the processqueue.php file that was, mostly, working I discovered that it had only about 100 lines not the 1300 plus on the original. What happened to those 1200 lines?

Your solution may very well work but first I need to be able to understand why those lines disappeared. Can you explain this and guide me so that I can try your plan?

Thanks.

@Richard Possibly you are confusing two files. The file that I identified is admin/actions/processqueue but there is another file admin/processqueue.php which is about 100 lines long.

The simplest thing is just to reinstall phplist completely and forget about my suggested change.

PROGRESS.

You were right. I confused the two similar sounding files. I reinstalled the entire phpList List folder. Copy and pasted your fix and there was an improvement. Text appeared that gave me the expected information and it remained on the screen. Unfortunately is did not refresh as the process went on so I couldn’t tell how many and how fast the emails were being sent.

You are definitely on the right track. Any other ideas? Should I follow up with support for your bug report?

Thanks.

I use cron, so not sure if this will work for you, but if you want to monitor your send,
open another tab and go to Campaigns/List Campaigns > Active
this should give you some real time stats, and the little graph icon (in yet another tab) will give you more info.

Hope this helps

Hi duncanc:
SUCCESS.

By changing my config.php file FROM: (‘MAILQUEUE_BATCH_SIZE’, 0) TO: (‘MAILQUEUE_BATCH_SIZE’, 72) and (‘MAILQUEUE_BATCH_PERIOD’, 36) your fix worked perfectly.

Bravo! Thanks again.