Hi Folks,
Environments:
1) ARS / ITSM 7.6.04 p4 Linux Oracle (customer dev machine - ie larger
than the average VM)
2) ARS / ITSM 7.6.04 p0 Windows 2003 x64, MS SQL VM
2 cores (4 cpu to the OS) 8 Gb
3) ARS / ITSM 8.0.0 p0 Linux Oracle
VM 2 cores (4 cpu to the OS) 8 Gb
I create archive forms in an automated way one time but for many forms (over
100 in a full run). The forms I do this for are all "Regular" forms: not
Joins or other forms types.
In the API it is a simple argument passed to ARSetSchema on the non-archive
schema.
I find each creation takes 5 to 7 minutes, takes a huge amount of memory on
the server - most of which is not released when completed, and drives the
server CPU quite high to calm down again when completed.
More concern is the fact that ARS crashes occasionally. For example, once
after a customer built 4 forms on his development machine the server crashed
building the 5th. After it restarted (automatically - the common fix these
days for bad code in an application) a rerun of the job caused no server
crashes at all for a subsequent 29ish forms. (Just running the creation
against the Incident forms).
On my VMs this also happens on rareish occasions. If I had to put a number
on it, it would average once per 40ish forms - but this is a guestimate at
best. It is run once and only once per VM instance and I tend to run it
against all requests rather than say just Incident. Because of snapshots,
it is easy enough to rerun this job.
Obviously, causing a crash is never good, and documentation reading "this
process can cause server crashes" is not a good thing J
I also always restart the server process once the forms are built to clean
up the memory - also not a good thing to tell customers: that after building
their archive forms, their server "should" be restarted to clean up leaked
memory J
Of course it is hard to replicate this using Dev Studio as one must create a
single archive form, wait the requisite 5 or so minutes, then manually
create the next one. My process creates one, waits the requisite time, and
then creates the next - right away (after say a few milliseconds).
I have not tried this yet on 8.1 but intend to do so shortly.
A further irritation is that the BMC documentation indicates that Merge
writes into these forms are permitted. Yet I get the error saying that
writes into these forms is not permitted - with all variations of the Merge
options. I have not tested this on a lot of releases but it is true in the
8.0.0 unpatched release. I simply disassociate the archive forms from their
original forms to get around this.
Just curious. Has anyone dealt with this? Or communicated with BMC on
this? I suppose I should raise a BMC ticket but I generally do not do this
unless a customer has asked (and paid) me to do so J
Ben Chernys
Senior Software Architect
logoSthInc-sm
Canada / Deutschland
Mobile: +49 171 380 2329 GMT + 1 + [ DST ]
Email: <mailto:Ben.Chernys_AT_softwaretoolhouse.com>
Ben.Chernys_AT_softwaretoolhouse.com
Web: <http://www.softwaretoolhouse.com/> www.softwaretoolhouse.com
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Check out Software Tool House's free Diary Editor and out Freebies
Section for ITSM 7.6.04 and 8.0.0 Fields spreadsheets.
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