Forums

Profile statistics, profile display pictures, and MAL-generated forum signatures occasionally stop updating. This happens uncommonly when the process that updates them is interrupted, but they will eventually update when the issue is resolved. Sometimes it gets hung up on certain tasks and and crawls along slowly, perhaps updating your profile occasionally and sticking again until it cycles through all the other users on MAL.

The following parts of your profile are affected:

• Profile statistics that count the number of series in each watching status may update slowly or not at all. The statistics on your list may be outdated as well.
  
  
• The display picture on your profile may take many days to update. The update process is responsible for copying your new display pictures to the CDN servers that serve all of MAL's images, so changes to them may be delayed. Even when the process is running perfectly there is at least a one hour cache delay (see here).
  
  
• MAL-hosted signatures that you create (the one in your profile settings) will also not update. You can however click the Update Signature button at the bottom of that page to update them manually. RSS update feeds are not affected, so external signatures should update normally.

Why is this happening?
There is a process that scours your user profiles and updates certain information on them, such as your list statistics, profile statistics, profile picture, and signature updates. It has been repeatedly disabled during server maintenance and is not working properly at the moment due simply to memory limits and handling massive numbers of users.

What's being done?
Efforts have already been made to combat this issue, though the initial attempts have failed. At first only newer users were affected (since the process goes in order of user id and would run out of memory part way):
http://myanimelist.net/forum/?topicid=289848
A priority queue was implemented so that the user who had waited the longest would have their profile update first. It worked for a few days but eventually statistics slowed to a crawl for all users. It was since remedied again but stopped working after a few weeks.

Xinil and Crave are already aware of the issue and moderators have no power to remedy this so please be patient. All of your list updates are going through perfectly even if the numbers on your profile don't increment for a while. Profile pictures will update intermittently even if they do not show immediately (there is a one hour delay even when they are working).

This issue affects everyone. We ask that you do not create additional topics about these issues. Thanks for your understanding.

Current Status: Seems to be updating normally at the moment (within an hour or two)