Distribution, Manufacturing, and Internet Modules

[SPyle]

I don't know if I have finally exceeded the capacity of EBM.  I'm on 4.30.  I have 4656 categories; there are 5240 records in the IT_OrderCategoryTree and IT_StoreCategoryTree; I have 45096 records in the IT_ItemCategory file.  Many are in duplicate categories.

Now, when I remove items from a particular category, they do not disappear.  I have reloaded the page, restarted the store, shut down the store and rebuilt all of the IT files. I even rebooted the server.  These items still appear on categories to which they are no longer assigned.

I run the web engine as a service on Windows 2003 Web Server as the only process on the server along with IIS.  Every time the service starts, there are 2 extra iterations of pvxwin32 that start and subsequently do NOT stop when the service is stopped.  I have to manually abort these to rebuild the files as a couple are perpetually held open.  While running as a service, I cannot run the Web Config utility to monitor the store.  I get an error that "1 user limit is exceeded".

Has anyone shared these experiences?  Anyone like a "REAL" challenge?  I am about ready to purge all of the files and start rebuilding.

[Luke]

I'm afraid I don't have any ideas about your primary problem, and I hope I'm not derailing the conversation here, but I can shed some light on what one of those pvxwin32 processes is. I've heard this question many times.

E-Business Manager spawns a "cleanup process" the first time somebody accesses one of its web templates. It runs as a separate pvxwin32 process. Its main job is to clean up the messes that dead web sessions leave behind. Some of the messes that it's tasked with cleaning up are in shopping cart files and user files and such, and that's why it might prevent you from rebuilding some files. A secondary job is helping to resend emails that fail to send.

On my test systems in 4.10 and early 4.20, I never ever saw this cleanup process shut down on its own. In one of the 4.20 service updates, it got a major rewrite with lots of improvements. I found that the new version started shutting down on its own soon after I shut down the providex web server, and all was well.
In 4.30, it's back to its old behavior again, but at the same time I started working with 4.30 I got a completely new testing environment. The network that I'm doing my 4.30 testing on has several intermittent problems with email delivery that aren't related to MAS, and I suspect that the cleanup process won't die because it's trying in vain to deliver email. I haven't investigated this yet.

So that's one pvxwin32 process... I'm not sure what the second one would be, unless it's the providex web server itself. I never run the web server as a service, so maybe that has something to do with it.

[SPyle]

Luke,

I've got my MD coming to analyze the code on the first problem. 

I've had a few people say they prefer to run as an application rather than service, that it seems to run cleaner.  I like that I can monitor and look at the hit counters, etc when running as an app.  The only downside is the need to restart.  Occasionally, in spite of back-up power, etc., the system restarts or there may be a problem where I have to reboot remotely.  When that happens, the web engine will restart.  When running as an app, I cannot restart the web engine, as it shuts down when I log off remotely.

Do you know if there is a command string I can set up in a batch file to start the web engine and the two processes automatically?  That would resolve the need to run as a service.

Thanks.

[Luke]

I understand what you're saying about how running as a service gives you easy reliable restarts.

I only run E-Biz as a developer, not in any real-world situation, but here's what we do. 

Whenever someone has to restart the server machine, the first thing they do when it comes back up is to log in to the system console via terminal services (that's using "mstsc /console" on Windows Server 2003), start the ProvideX web server and any other server applications we need that aren't set up to run as services, and then disconnect (just click the "X" to disconnect, don't log out) from the session.  The session continues to run, the web server stays up, and if anyone wants to monitor it they just log back in to the system console and have a look.

I don't know if it's possible to write a batch file that would start the ProvideX web server upon startup, but the bigger problem is that the batch file would only run if somebody took the time to log in.  If you've got a conscientious body on the spot who can log in after a restart, what's two extra clicks?

Of course, like you say, if our system restarts on its own because of power fluctuations or unplanned maintenance, the webserver doesn't come back up until somebody restarts it.  I can appreciate how that would be unacceptable in the real world.  That's when you really want it to run as a service.

[SPyle]

It appears that the problem with deleting categories was a program problem.  Apparently it had something to do with accessing by the secondary key instead of the primary key.  Now, a new error is indicative of the IT-1017 extended solution.  It appears I'll be paying my MD to fix this also.