AOL Server Keepalive for Windows

Hi,

We are using 3.5.0.0.1  for quite some time in Windows XP platform. We are facing some strange issue , after every 15 days or so the aol-server service is getting stopped. We are unable to access the web page of project-open . If we try to manually stop the service it will not stop and  we need to restart the machine altogether. Once machine is up, everything works fine for some days and again the same issue.

I tried looking into forum but couldnt find any related issue. I have looked in to

http://openacs.org/test-doc/install-openacs-inittab

which talks about  using keepalive script with inititab. But unforunately i am unable to find it in project open folders. I could find daemontool in below directory but as i understood after searching in internet , we cannot use it for windows based installations.

C:\project-open\servers\projop\etc

Please let me know , if anyone encountered similar problem and if is it possible to use this keepalive script for project-open.

Thanks,
SV

Ok, I got the logs, I see this message repeated every day a number of times in error.log file but we don't have any problem in accessing the server.

But, the time it stops responding this was the last message.All other messages are of "Notice" type so not posting.

Please let me know if you can make out something. Generally it happens on weekends and we cannot access project-open on Mondays.

==========================================================

Notice: im_mail_import.process_mails0: Error creating '/web/projop/Maildir/spam' folder: 'mkdir ("/web/projop/Maildir/spam") failed:

no such file or directory'
Notice: acs-mail-lite: about to load qmail queue
Notice: acs_mail_lite::load_mail_dir: queue_dir=''
Notice: acs_mail_lite::load_mail_dir: queue dir = /new/*, no messages
Notice: sync: uid=32644, pid=50898, day=2012-03-20 00:00:00+05:30
Error: Tcl exception:
ambiguous option "file": must be authpassword, authuser, channel, close, content, contentlength, contentsentlength, contentchannel, copy, driver, encoding, files, fileoffset,

filelength, fileheaders, flags, form, headers, host, id, isconnected, location, method, outputheaders, peeraddr, peerport, port, protocol, query, request, server, sock, start,

status, url, urlc, urlencoding, urlv, version, or write_encoded
while executing
"ns_conn $var"
(procedure "ad_conn" line 90)
invoked from within
"ad_conn file"
(procedure "ad_parse_template" line 15)
invoked from within
"ad_parse_template -params [list

• ] "/packages/acs-tcl/lib/ad-return-com…"
  (procedure "ad_return_complaint" line 2)
  invoked from within
  "ad_return_complaint 1 "

""
(procedure "im_company_internal_helper" line 5)
invoked from within
"im_company_internal_helper"
("eval" body line 1)
invoked from within
"eval $script"
invoked from within
"ns_cache eval util_memoize $script {
list $current_time
}"
(procedure "util_memoize" line 20)
invoked from within
"util_memoize "
(procedure "im_company_internal" line 2)
invoked from within
"im_company_internal"
(procedure "im_cost::new" line 3)
invoked from within
"im_cost::new -cost_name $cost_name -user_id $hour_user_id -creation_ip "0.0.0.0" -cost_type_id "
("uplevel" body line 5)
invoked from within
"uplevel 1 $code_block "
("uplevel" body line 1)
invoked from within
"uplevel 1 $code_block "
invoked from within
"db_with_handle -dbn $dbn db {
set selection

set counter 0
while { [db_getrow $…"
(procedure "db_foreach" line 36)
invoked from within
"db_foreach hours $sql {

ns_log Notice "sync: uid=$hour_user_id, pid=$project_id, day=$day"
set cost_name "Timesheet $hour_date $project_nr $user_na…"
(procedure "im_timesheet2_sync_timesheet_costs" line 48)
invoked from within
"im_timesheet2_sync_timesheet_costs"
("eval" body line 1)
invoked from within
"eval [concat $args]"
(procedure "ad_run_scheduled_proc" line 42)
invoked from within
"ad_run_scheduled_proc {t f 61 im_timesheet2_sync_timesheet_costs {} 1331615237 0 f}"
Notice: nsmain: AOLserver/4.5.1 stopping
Notice: driver: stopping: nssock
Notice: nsmain: AOLserver/4.5.1 starting
========================================================

Hello SV,
I am the maitainer of the Windows port of ]po[.
The issue you are observing is very common and very normal.
The software stack Aolserver + TCL + Openacs + ]project-open[ suffers from memory leaks… it is a fact… and not only on Windows but on Linux and so on…
All standard installations, to avoid any problem, perform a restart at night to reset the resouce consumptions.
The periodicity that you are observing of 15 days quite likely depends on the memory size on your system and on how much ]project-open[ is used.
Another point on Windows installation os tha the log files do not rotate properly as well as in Linx.
So to make your installation robust I suggest you create a batch file like the following:

@echo off
net stop Aolserver-projop
del /F /Q C:\project-open\servers\projop\log\*.*
shutdown /r /t 0

And you call it every night at a given time via the Scheduled Tasks mechanism.

Hope it helps,
Maurizio

Thanks for your reply.

I will try the script and let you know if we are still experiencing the issue.

But i have a question, why do you recommend to restart the PC, instead of
"shutdown /r /t 0"  can we not just restart the "aol-server" by

"net start Aolserver-projop"

Do you foresee any other benefit of doing it ?

For us, we have this PC as continuously running server and ]po[ is one of many services running on this.

We do restart the server once in 3-4 months to avoid performance related problems.  But restarting the PC every day will have many things to reconfigure again which will be tedious task for us.

Please let me know your views on this.

Regards,
Sujata

Hello Sujata.
Your observation is more than correct, a simpler 'net start' command should do it. I used the shutdown becuase it was on a virtual machine running only ]po[.  in case you need continuos uninerrupted operation you need to adopt clustering techniques like the one described in here:
http://www.spazioit.com/pages_en/sol_inf_en/distributed-sandbox-for-application-servers_en/

Hope it helps.

Ciao,
Maurizio

Thanks you very much for the reply, and it is indeed on virtual server only.

But as of now , will use net start command and hopefully the issue should get resolved.

Thanks for the link , i will go through it.

Regards,
Sujata