As some of you may be aware I try and keep the engine on
www.capesoft.com as up to date as possible, in part to make use of new features, but also in part so that the engine is getting a good work-out as well.
Usually this is pretty transparent to everyone, something you don't, or at least shouldn't, notice at all.
With 7.04 that changed because the server became very unstable - crashing multiple times per day. At first it seemed like a memory leak was causing it, and I held back the 7.05 build until the cause was known for sure.
The short report is - no, it wasn't a memory leak, and the issue was confined to the HOST.EXE program, so it's not something you need to worry about too much. If you are using the Host though I recommend upgrading to 7.05 as soon as possible.
The issue only occurred because of two factors. One is the large number of DLL's attached to the Host on the CapeSoft site. At the moment we have around 17 DLL's (and around 40 static domains) being served by the server. This means it also gets a large number of sessions (typically 600 or so sessions are active at a time) and a fair amount of traffic (around 20 000 hits per day).
This large amount of DLL's means that the Ram consumed to start a thread is quite high. Recent changes in the host sends a NotifyDelete message to each DLL (on it's own thread) when a session is deleted. These threads were not being considered when calculating the maximum threads the server should have open at any one time.
Couple all these facts together and it was possible for 100 to 200 threads to be created "instantly" when a bunch of sessions were marked for deletion. This drove the memory up too high, and Windows spat the program.
Once the cause was understood it was relativity simple to fix. DeleteSession threads are now counted against the thread limit and other minor tweaks help keep the load under control.
On the up side the Logging in the host has been extended a lot. This can be seen on the "Log File" tab of the hot. Many machine related parameters are now captured with requests, and requests are logged both as they arrive, and when they complete. If a request should crash the server for some reason, it'll be a lot easier to see that in the log.
In addition the "Sites" tab, which shows list of DLL's now includes the date and time the DLL was compiled, and also the Exe date and time. This should make spotting version mis-matches a lot easier.
Thanks for all your patience during this time - I appreciate that it's a pain not being able to access the site on demand. However the result is a stronger engine for all of us, which I think is a good thing overall.
Cheers
Bruce
Topic: 7.04 Site Feedback (Read 4011 times)