I started running into the dread, "FTP timeout error" when trying to publish an early draft of a website I'm working on. I was actually able to publish the site via DPX to the same location, successfully, and started running into this error just a few days ago (after taking one or more DPX updates I believe).

I've done some homework on this - googled it pretty thoroughly, read a number of threads for folks who have run into this occasional issue publishing websites from one of the Xara products, and:

  • I've checked for and accepted all pending updates for DPX, and I'm now on version: 12.6.2.49603 .
  • I do not have a lot of large images on the site - but I went ahead and Optimized all of them anyway.
  • Although I do have the "retina" option turned on for his res displays (I work on 4K displays), I checked, and the images don't appear to to be the problem: all of them were successfully published to the FTP site, and none are bigger than 146 KB - the largest file on the site.
  • I navigated to the FTPLibcURL section of the Windows registry and increased all the timeouts to 20 seconds, as recommended by Xara support to other users running into timeouts.


Still no joy -- my "publish" attempts make it to 99%, and the uploader apparently retries a few times before finally giving up and declaring that FTP has timeout out, or a message indicating "remote file not found".


  • I exported the website to a local folder on my pc, and compared the files that were exported there, and they are virtually identical to the files that DID make it up to the FTP / web directory: with one exception. There are the same 331 files in the index_htm_files directory both on my local machine (where I exported them) and on the web server / FTP site. The ONLY difference is that the "index.htm" file itself didn't make it up there, although it published locally just fine. The file is small -- about 1.01MB.
  • I also watched the publishing progress indicator - and could see that index.htm is the file it got stuck on, retrying several times on this file before giving up.
  • For comparsion, if I use my own FTP client, the entire site is easily uploadable - including the "index.htm" file in the folder above "index_htm_files". The FTP client doesn't hestitate at all on "index.htm". It's just the uploader in DPX that gets stuck on the file.


This is also definitely NOT due to a resource constraint:

My Internet connection is via Verizon FIOS at 150 MBPS up/down (I test periodically, and am getting that, or very close, at the laptop itself). The machine I'm working on is just a few months old, i7 Kaby Lake based, 32GB DDR4, 1TB SSD. Latest Windows version, all updates applied. I also have a few decades of technical experience, so if there are tech issues to discuss, please don't hesitate!

Everything flies with the publish function - until it tries to publish the one "index.htm" file to the FTP / web server.

The only thing I can think of that's different between the files that publish with no problem (the 300+ in the index_htm_files folder) and the one that doesn't, is that the "index.htm" file is NOT in that subfolder. It sits one level higher...but as I'm using this as a test location, the whole thing is located in a subfolder under another website on the server:

Domain name is "stronggroup.com" (there's an 8 year old webpage sitting there that I have to replace when I have the time! please ignore that old one! also please remember that the new site I'm working on is very much "in progress" - much of the content is still placeholders, etc.).

Under the root for "stronggroup.com" on the server, there's a folder "mpartnersltd", which is the logical root for the site I'm building with DPX. The "index.htm" file sits in this "mpartnersltd" subfolder, and from the web the location for this file is:


Remember: I had to manually FTP this "index.htm" file to the web server in this location, since "publish" couldn't do it - that's how it got up there. In that same folder is the "index_htm_files" folder with all 331 files that match the ones that I exported to my local machine. I did NOT have to manually FTP these -- all 331 got up there via "publish".

The only difference between what Export and Publish did was that Publish couldn't update the index.htm file. That's the one it got stuck on and retried uploading several times before Publish gave up.

---

For the moment, I can continue to export and manually FTP, although I prefer the workflow via the Publish option if we can get it working.

Thanks in advance for any thoughts / suggestions.

- Jon