Is Separate broken?

[Marc]

I separated a pair of editions from a work. Both separations got stuck on "We're processing your request. Please be patient" for 30 minutes. 30 minutes after the separations started each of them finished with the message "Status of job lost."

In another tab where I had the combine list up I hit refresh and I saw that the separates had worked and took less than a minute. I moved ahead and combined the two records while the first two browser tabs were still stuck on trying to separate. The combines worked normally.

The URLs of the one of the stuck separations was
https://www.goodreads.com/book/wait?k...

The other one finished with "Status of job lost" before I could save the URL.

[Arenda]

Happens almost all the time I do a separate.

And also reported to Support a year ago, where they said they couldn't replicate it.

[Sandra]

Yep, if it doesn't go through, for an easy separate, in about 60 seconds, I always go check another tab of the combine page, and nearly always it has already worked.

Of course, for a more complicated one it takes way longer, and sometimes it doesn't work & you have to re-do it.

[lethe]

Arenda wrote: "Happens almost all the time I do a separate.

And also reported to Support a year ago, where they said they couldn't replicate it."

*snort*

[Renske]

When separating books, two steps are happening in the change log. First you get for each involved edition an entry about the change of the work ID, and then one entry that you separated the work. The first generally happens fast and then the editions show separated, but the second is the one that appears after the separate tool is done. And if you get the 'status of job lost' the second one doesn't appear in the log. (Well, most of the time, sometimes it appears after an hour or so when your merge is already done.)

I don't know what the system is doing in between and if we should try to wait for that and what could happen if we don't wait.

[Marc]

Thank you Renske. I'll file a bug report about this anyway. Another librarian spotted my separated records but missed the note I'd left in the description field on why it was separated. He combined them back into the main list. I separated the records again and again have the "We're processing your request. Please be patient." spinning away despite that the actual separation seems to have been done quickly. I've added a librarian note saying to not combine the records as those are visible in the combine list.

The work has 169 edition records. It's not an extraordinary number and so should not be hanging up like this.

[Arenda]

Marc wrote: "The work has 169 edition records. It's not an extraordinary number and so should not be hanging up like this."

From what I've experienced, the number of shelvings seems to be the deciding factor for the time it needs to separate, not the number of editions. And this one (https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2...) is shelved by a lot of users: "added by 894547 people"

[Marc]

Arenda wrote: "From what I've experienced, the number of shelvings seems to be the deciding factor..."

Thank you Arenda. That seems like a useful clue and so I updated the bug report.