import/contact might be temporarily down or it may have moved permanently to a n

[CiviGuy]

There must be some late night-no-import rule, but here goes:

Trying to import a couple of thousand comma-delimite records into an new database - see this message:

/path/to/site/civicrm/import/contact might be temporarily down or it may have moved permanently to a new web address.

  More information on this error
Below is the original error message

Error 324 (net::ERR_EMPTY_RESPONSE): Unknown error.

(Is this a 'clear caches' kind of thing?) - Well, no, apparently it wasn't
------------------
UPDATE:

All of this was caused by presence of two ASCII NULLS in a file of several hundred thousand characters.

I won't be able to provide a PHP-based fix in the very near term, but:

I wonder if a pre-flight 'grep' of the import file, to check for any potential gotchas, wouldn't be a good idea?  Could also be coupled with an optional 'tr' command, to strip out any such offenders: CTRL characters, non-ASCII chars, ASCII NULLS?

These tools are readily available, at least on all flavors of *NIX.

[peverist]

I am getting this message as well trying to import records (joomla & latest CiviCRM install) - it displays the same message as below between the match fields and preview screen steps. I started halving the records until it worked then added blocks until I found a record it failed on. Unfortunately further trial and error indicated failing rows worked ok when imported further up the list and the problem seemed so be when there are around 80 or more records (regardless of what order the data is in).

I am stumped - I will likely get around it by splitting the import file into several smaller files but I am concerned about why this is happening. I have only just installed the database and this is the first import of records and I'm hitting strange, almost random, errors already which doesn't give me confidence.

I have turned debugging and back trace on but they aren't displaying any data to help - is there a log file i need to look at or should it be on the screen when it displays the message?

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated

Phil