Crawler Won’t Restart

Hoping someone can help me. Am I just not understanding this. I’m stuck staring at the crawler status screen which just states, “Start Watching…” and then the second line just prints dots and then repeats over and over again.

I have tried everything. Clear all cache, clear cloudflare cache, click reset position, click manually run, hit R to manually run. It shows “Started async crawling” at the top of the screen when I do that, and it refreshes the screen, but still the “start watching…”.

I have tried turning off the crawler on the crawler cron under settings tab. Save, turn back on, save.

I have literally tried everything. Then suddenly, sometimes, it starts processing again, until it gets stuck again at say position 71.

Then I try the above steps again, over and over again and it still sits on this ridiculous “start watching…” black status screen.

How the heck do I get this thing to actually run, with a consistent step by step process. This is maddening.