What happens if my server runs out of memory mid-import?
Each stage writes to per-import staging tables (wp_super_speedy_imports_batch_<id> etc.). The data the FAILING stage was writing may be partial or absent; everything from earlier stages is committed and intact.
Browser and scheduled runs check whether a step that stopped responding is still running. A step that is still working is waited for; a step whose PHP process died is run again automatically, as many times as it takes: there is no retry limit, and Stop ends it. That covers the import stages that are safe to repeat (all but a few), each stage’s finishing step and the final step that writes the run’s summary, which still records the run, sends its report and runs completion hooks once. A scheduled run killed part way through loading the file resumes after the rows it had already loaded, and one killed while fixing product attributes resumes from the page of products it had reached. A WP-CLI run re-spawns a worker that was killed or ran out of memory.
The one step that is not run again is setup, before anything has been imported: a setup that runs out of memory ends the run straight away, with the reason, so you can raise the limit and start the import again.
If the WP-CLI process itself (wp ssi) is killed, nothing is left to re-run it:
- Identify the failing stage from
wp_ssi_import_history_stages. A stage is recorded there when it finishes, so the failing stage is the one after the run’s last recorded stage. - Re-run just that stage + any later stages:
wp ssi <id> <failing-stage>,<next>,.... - The staging tables let the re-run pick up from where the previous run died; no need to re-load the CSV.
See MySQL stopped mid-import for the full failure-recovery walk-through and Choosing parallel workers per stage to size workers to fit available RAM.
The Imports tab is blank or shows a critical error
On a site with thousands of saved imports, versions before 3.18 could use more memory than WordPress allows just to list them, leaving the Imports tab blank or showing a critical error. The Imports tab loads well within a default 128M memory limit at 5,000 saved imports. Update the plugin if you see this.
Further reading
Written for Super Speedy Imports 3.68.0.
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