IWP Sessions Suddenly Not Terminating

[Zardoz]

Has anyone experienced the problem of IWP sessions suddenly no longer terminating properly?

What happens is that, seemingly out of the blue, the number of active IWP sessions in our IWP databases continues to grow until the maximum number of concurrent sessions is reached. During this time, IWP clients are connecting to databases and then quitting the databases as usual. There is no indication that anything is wrong until you monitor the number of current sessions in the FSA Web Publishing Administration Console (or if you monitor the number of concurrent users in your database(s)) and see that the number only increases--it never decreases to reflect a terminated session. Once the maximum number of sessions is reached, clients who attempt to connect will see a message that states something like "the maximum number of allowed connections has been exceeded."

By "out of the blue", I mean that this is not our normal situation, as normally, the sessions are terminating properly. But when it happens, it is a pain. It has happened twice now in the past 2-3 months.

The only way I know how to solve this is to restart the "Web Publishing Engine (WPC)" service. But this doesn't seem to generate a message to any currently connected users to advise them that their database connections will be lost. So by restarting this service without warning, I could potentially be creating a variety of problems for clients.

This is not a situation of having specified insufficient IWP sessions using the FileMaker Server Admin Tool. We have monitored IWP client usage and we know what normal usage levels are. We also have set IWP sessions to timeout after 10 minutes, so it is not a case of idle sessions lingering on and on.

I have two questions:

1. Has anyone else experienced this problem and/or does anyone have suggestions for why it is occurring?

2. When it is necessary to restart the "Web Publishing Engine (WPC)" service, is there a way to alert any currently connected clients?

We are running FMS7A on W2K3.

Thanks.

[ernie]

I have reported this problem to FileMaker. I thought it might be to do with validated fields but now I am not so sure.

[xochi]

I've seen something similar. An otherwise normally working IWP setup will sometimes create blank records. Investigation revealed that the records had a creation time and modification time exactly 45 minutes apart (which is the timeout value I use in the IWP setup). I was also receiving complaints from certain users that it "wouldn't work".

I believe this may be caused by incompatible browsers not doing the javascript right? Specifically, IE 5 for mac?

However, on my system, once the 45 minutes passed, they were logged of IWP, so this may not be the same issue.

What is your timeout duration set to?

[ernie]

My time duration is set to 10 min.

I wonder if this problem has been fixed in version 8?