Thursday, February 25, 2010

"Unknown Error. Please reload the page." when using the File Manager part of Hosting Control Center from godaddy

I've been using the File Manager from godaddy to unzip some tarballs with updates to my web site. I had to rely on this somehow manual approach as any attempt to do the same programatically, through scripts launched by cron jobs would be cut short. That's because there seems to be a limit on how long a user-initiated process could run on godaddy.

In some cases I'd get an "Unknown Error message" after some unzipping finishes and I try to start a new one. That's presumably because the file manager tries to figure out all new files created as a result of unzipping. However beside showing that useless error message, for just a few seconds before hiding it (awful usability), the error condition seems to recover only after logging out and logging back in after at least 5 minutes.

I discovered one way to avoid the error in the first place. Don't start a new unzipping until the first one stops for good. When does that happen ? Not when the system tells you, but when you see that the checkbox for the archived being unzipped becomes unselected. Depending on the complexity of the archive, that may happen a few minutes after the unzipping finishes.

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