I've been working on upgrading my forum to 1.4 (from 1.2.13), and I keep running into the same problem when running the upgrade script.
There are about 850,000 posts in my database, and when the script finishes converting the posts, it pauses for a minute or two, and then refreshes with a blank page. Every time I run the script the same issue occurs.
Any help would be appreciated!
Try upping the hard time out limit in your php.ini
I tried that; I also tried upping the Apache timeout and mySQL timeout, all to no avail. I timed how long it takes before the script "gives up" and its about 60 seconds, which seems to indicate that its caused by some sort of resource limit.
You should up your memory limit too. 850,000 posts sounds like about 1 GB. When you alter a table, MySQL has to copy it to a temporary table, then alter whatever needs altering then confirm it's all working and repair any columns in need of repairing then overwrite it on top of the old table. MySQL tried to put it into memory but if it can't fit it has to revert to the HD which is significantly slower.
So in essence, during big upgrade procedures, you should keep your memory limit to about double the size of your largest table (assuming you have enough memory to support it). That usually helps a lot.
I set my memory limit to 2048M, and still no go. I do have more RAM available in my server, but it doesn't seem like that's the problem.
Apparently the problem was with Safari. Running the upgrade script on Firefox 3 seems to have resolved the issue.