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Not sure if this is an error or something I have failed to configure correctly. I have tested all the facts and events options I am likely to use on the report and all work fine except Birth and Death, which produce nothing (i.e. no “No records to Display” message – nothing below the horizontal line under the entry boxes. Have checked that I have both BIRT and DEAT defined in Family Tree-Edit Options- All Individual facts; Facts and Events Report enabled and ‘show to visitors.

Ron in France Website: https://clan-davies.kiwitrees.net/ kiwitrees 3.3.11; PHP 8.0.14

That’s most likely a server memory problem. If you select Births with no qualifiers you are effectively trying to list your entire tree.

There should be an error message in the kiwitrees Logs, and / or the server error logs.

Try selecting Births within a span of (say) ten years, or at a specific place. That was always really the intent of that report, even before this update.

Nigel
My personal kiwitrees site is www.our-families.info

For both Birth and Death I only tried with ‘realistic’ qualifiers. Started with just a span of ten years, then with a span of ten years AND a location, then with a span of one year. Then a specific year, with the location and secondary ‘detail’ for a known individual. Still the same result.
Nothing in kiwitrees log. Will check server logs now.

Ron in France Website: https://clan-davies.kiwitrees.net/ kiwitrees 3.3.11; PHP 8.0.14

Nothing in server logs either.

Ron in France Website: https://clan-davies.kiwitrees.net/ kiwitrees 3.3.11; PHP 8.0.14

This issue is now solved, thanks to help from Nigel. I’m reporting back here in case it is of help to others.

1. Nigel was right – it WAS a server memory problem and it WAS covered in the logs – I was looking in the wrong place!.
2. This can be a problem for anyone having a very large database like mine AND a server memory limit set too low. My database has over 15000 individuals and the GEDCOM weighs in at about 17MB. My server memory limit was set by the hosting service at 128MB (which they told me is quite a common default setting). Nigel suggested that I encourage the hosting service to increase it to 256MB, which they did.
3. In order for kiwitrees to take advantage of the increase in allocated memory, it is necessary to indicate the new memory limit in admin/ site admin/ site config / Memory Limit. Having done this the problem reported above went away.
4. The only Facts and Events reports which hit this problem in my case were ones which selected Birth or Death in the Fact or Event drop-down list. Even when the qualifiers reduced the number of items in the final report to a few (eg people born in a given year or a given village in a short space of time), the way the code works it has first to identify all the INDI records that contain the selected GEDCOM tag, and uses some memory for each of these before then resolving the qualifiers, so although for the less common tags the memory demand is not great, for BIRT which almost all INDI records have and DEAT which a large proportion of INDI records will have, the memory required, for large databases, can exceed the limit. In this case, no report and no message is produced by kiwitrees, neither is there an error message in the kiwitrees log, but an error message appears in the error_log in the kiwitrees folder on the server.

Thanks again to Nigel for identifying the cause of the problem and helping me to resolve it.

Ron in France Website: https://clan-davies.kiwitrees.net/ kiwitrees 3.3.11; PHP 8.0.14

Ron, thanks for the detailed feedback.

This reminds me that the PHP requirements for kiwitrees in the FAQs could do with some revising. I’ll try to do that soon.

For others reading this, Ron’s paragraph (quoted below) is accurate for his installation / server but may be completely different on yours.

The location of server log files is highly variable. So ask your web host where they are. In my experience Ron’s “in the kiwitrees folder on the server” is quite unusual.

Many web hosts, including Ron’s, disable the PHP setting that allows errors to appear directly on your web pages. That looks better if errors are minor and we don’t fix them quickly, but does make finding the problem harder, especially if they make accessing server logs hard or even impossible in some cases.

Memory issues such as discussed here generally cannot be caught and added to the kiwitrees log as they shut the system down before kiwitrees can respond.

clandav wrote:

In this case, no report and no message is produced by kiwitrees, neither is there an error message in the kiwitrees log, but an error message appears in the error_log in the kiwitrees folder on the server.

Nigel
My personal kiwitrees site is www.our-families.info