Sync Server Hang

[pjames95003]

Hi Folks...me again... :-)

We are on 7.2.2 LAN with Remote Office (Network Sync) and other remote users (FTP Sync).  I could use some of your collective wisdom.   Yesterday, I cut two user databases at the same time. Each user gets all accounts. Each sxd file is 420 megs and created on a network drive with many GB of available space. Each user also gets all attachments. The attachments for each user are something just over 2 GB and total 59,000 total files each.  The attachments were just sent to the users by having the "Send Attachments" box checked in the Create Database utility.

[No, the sync server services were not stopped during the cut. Perhaps another topic for discussion later.... According to our BP and to Sage Support, stopping the sync services during db cuts is not necessary for versions 7.x and up.  This hasn't caused us any known issues in the past, and due to the separations of duties, I don't  have access to the servers to do this, and coordinating with our IT group for random db cuts would be challenging at best.]

The cut went fine. Then shortly afterwards the sync server hung.  Looking at processes in the Windows Task Manager on the sync server, our Network Architect noted that the entire CPU was being pegged by three separate threads of the SLX AgentRunner.exe.  Looked like this....

(Server 2003 SP2 - 2 GB RAM   There is 5.5 GB free space in the Sync Folder)

Image Name                 CPU           Mem Usage

AgentRunner.exe            50             34,028

AgentRunner.exe            30             34,060

AgentRunner.exe            20             34,020

SyncServer.exe                0             96,764

AgentQueue.exe              0                3,200

AgentQueue.exe              0                3,224

AgentQueue.exe              0                3,216

I haven't found much on what AgentRunner.exe does completely, but did find a post which associated it to the Agents created in the admin tool...  [new suspect enters stage right...]  Also, perhaps coincidentally, I did create a new agent in the past couple days. The agent runs a Remote Task of sending a file to some remote users. It runs just once a day at 10:00 am. For testing, I was sending a 3 kb file, but two days ago, I changed that to a 8 meg file copied from a network server (not the same physical server as the sync server).  The test users received the file, so that doesn't appear to be the issue, but needed to throw that in there as well.

So, I guess I am curious about

1. What, if any of the above, likely caused the crash?

2. Should I just send the attachment another way?

3. What does AgentRunner.exe actually run?

4. Bonus Question: Is it really okay to cut DB's on version 7.x with the sync services still running. ;-)

As always, I  greatly appreciate your continued guidance.

Patrick

[LEsposito]

(7.2.2) No expert here, in fact, having our own problems documented in an earlier post but we stopped sending our attachments through the Sync Server when we reached 2 GB (now up to 6). We just copy the files from the server to the computer (about 45 min) or copy them to DVD if user will not be in the office any time soon.

And we have never been concerned about stopping Sync Services, even in 5x & 6x days. We just made sure not to cut a remote when our Sync Server was scheduled to run (10 min after every even hour and takes only a minute or 2). On occasion I would forget and even then it didn't seem to be a problem.

Our sync server hangs inexplicably every now and then (2 or 3x per year) but I don't think we've been able to track down a reason although our resources were typically marginal and we've since upped them to 1 GB RAM and 18 GB Storage as discussed in the other post.

I suspect AgentRunner Runs Agents but I would think most don't even use this functionality - we don't.

Thanks,
Larry Esposito

[dennissekulic]

Here is what I do to cut remotes, it makes like easy and doesn't hang your sync up:

1. When ready to cut a remote, stop the sync service when the service is not actively running.

2. In Administrator, Click on Tools > Create Remote User Databases.

3. Choose the user who will be getting the remote database from the available users list and move that user over to the selected users list.

4. Click on Properties and ensure that the Send Attachments box is unchecked. The Generate New Site Code check box should also be unchecked unless determined that it is needed from the aforementioned criteria. Click OK when done.

5. Cut the remote Database. 

6. Once the cut is done, restart the sync service.

Once the remote database has been created, do the following:

1. Copy all of the files from SLXAttachments folder to the local PC, specifically into C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\SalesLogix\Documents

2. Ensure the database is located on the local PC.

3. As long as the computer name has not changed, you can double click on the database file and the attachment of the database will run automatically.

4. Once completed, run SalesLogix and perform a sync to ensure file movement is happening between the local database and the SLX server (NOTE: this may require syncing more than once to see movement).

This should help you out a lot!

[dennissekulic]

FYI the reason you want to stop the service and not sync attachments over is the fact that if you have an extremely large amount of attachments to move over, the log file it creates to send those attachments takes a significant amount of time to chug through on the server end (our average is 2 hours) which causes a backlog of files to be processed.

Doing your remote DB cut this way saves your users hours upon hours of attachment syncing and doesn't cause a backlog on your server of files to process.