S/R error: "project is busy"

Question

When our remote colleague tried to do Send/Receive yesterday it appeared not to complete. He repeatedly got a “project is busy” error message. However, we did receive the edits he has recently made in several NT books.

Can anyone help us troubleshoot this error message, please? We only have a day or two left before he returns to the land of no internet.

Answer 1

The “Project xyz is busy. Retrying…” status during send/receive means that the repository on the send/receive server is locked.

Normally this lock is released quickly, but if a user gets an error that prevents the final unlock command from being sent, the project will stay locked for about 30 minutes. We were trying to give plenty of time for a slow connection. I have thought we may be able to shorten that time if we reset the start time for the lock whenever a step during the send/receive is processed.

When the project is locked, no user will be able to do send/receive - even the user that had the lock originally. We did this since some users have more than one machine.

John+Wickberg

Paratext Support

Comments

Thank you, John+Wickberg, for explaining this. We’ve noticed this same problem – we work in an area with marginal internet bandwidth at the best of times. It commonly drops off for minutes at a time (while servicing other users’ requests I suspect).
Any chance you all could implement those strategies you mentioned for providing a quicker reset? 30 minutes is a LONG time.
You suggest resetting the clock after each step (and each project synch). If PT8 expected each step to complete in say 3-5 minutes, then if the last step is reached, PT8 will hang on for about 5 more minutes before giving up and releasing the lock. That sounds like a much more forgiving approach (and less confusing to other users–with good internet–who don’t know why they are randomly getting blocked).

Answer 2

Thank you, John+Wickberg. This is helpful to know!

Comments

Just a friendly reminder to anyone with questions like this one. It’s always worth taking a look in Help, there’s a great deal of useful information within, including a topic about this. We strive to make it possible to find answers to these problems, realising that the people who encounter them don’t always have internet access. If we think a message within Paratext doesn’t explain the issue clearly enough, we try to ensure there’s a Help topic to further explain.