FM Server Froze Under Heavy Load

[FMAaron]

We recently tried to administer a survey using IWP. Everything was running fine until we had 45 people logged on at the same time. I was watching the stats on the Admin Console and all of a sudden everything dropped to zero and stopped changing. The 45 people still showed up as being logged on. At the same time IWP stopped responding. Everyone that was in the survey system could not move to other layouts and no one could access the main IWP page.

The server showed that all processes associated with FMS were running normally. We eventually restarted the machine. After it came back on everything worked.

After going over the logs I don't really see any weird activity or errors at the time of the crash.

I suspect that our Database Cache size is currently to low at 64MB. Could this have been what caused our problem?

Was this just an IWP issue? I now regret not doing the survey with PHP.

Any other advice would be great!

NOTE: Our FMSA runs on a Windows 2003 server with 3.7Ghz and 2GB ram.

[IdealData]

AFAIK there is a 100 "session" limit in all web publishing. I say "session" as there is some confusion between users and what FMS regards as "sessions".

45 users could have tripped the 100 limit.

Maybe a dual machine deployment would help?

[Steven H. Blackwell]

You should have 4 GB RAM installed if you are going to be doing that amount of IWP work. IWP sessions are really rather intensive. Then set the cache to 800 MB and the leave the flush interval at one minute.

Steven

[FMAaron]

Thanks so much for the responses!

What exactly constitutes a "session?" I ignorantly thought that the "user" count on the Admin Console was a good indication of where I was in relation to that 100 session limit.

Are there any techniques that I could use when building IWP solutions that would minimize resource usage on the server side?

Next time I do something like that I'm DEFINITELY going with PHP!

[Steven H. Blackwell]

ALL web connections, IWP or CWP, have session constraints. Some are more restrictive than others.

In IWP, a session is a persistent connection to the Web Publishing Engine. See the IWP Guide that comes with Server Advanced for more details.

Steven