topic Alfresco startup takes more than 30 min. in Alfresco Archive

Alfresco startup takes more than 30 min.

martinsmith — Tue, 08 Sep 2015 07:58:39 GMT

Hi,I'm begginer in Alfresco. Lately our client ask us about Alfresco startup time reduction which takes more than 30 minutes.Alfresco is setup on one phisicall machine in number of two instances(Version :Community - v3.4.0 (d 3370)). Logs from startup shows that there is in total 22 minutes gap bee

Re: Alfresco startup takes more than 30 min.

afaust — Tue, 08 Sep 2015 08:30:56 GMT

Hello,

it looks like schema validation and any operations that occur between schema validation and start of sysadmin subsystem are already costing you around 14 - 16 minutes alone.

These three log statements are interesting:
05:02:18,359 INFO [domain.schema.SchemaBootstrap] Schema managed by database dialect org.alfresco.repo.domain.hibernate.dialect.AlfrescoOracle9Dialect.
05:11:19,838 INFO [domain.schema.SchemaBootstrap] No changes were made to the schema.
05:18:27,012 INFO [management.subsystems.ChildApplicationContextFactory] Starting 'sysAdmin' subsystem, ID: [sysAdmin, default]

One thing you can try for starters is to disable schema validation. This is typically only required for upgrade scenarios and not that relevant in the day-to-day operation. Also, I know from personal experience that Oracle can be slow when retrieving database metadata from a shared service (did not figure out why precisely) / larger database server.

Depending on how much that drops your startup time, I suggest you go ahead and add some SQL profiling / logging to your Alfresco system to see what Alfresco is talking with the database. Even if the database is fast, there may be an issue where Alfresco is talking "a lot" with the database which can slow things down depending on network overhead.
SQL logging can be added via P6Spy or other JDBC logging facades, if it is not possible to log / monitor on the DB server side.

One customer of ours once encountered a bug in Alfresco which would created thousands of unnecessary transactions due to bad scoping, which only hurt the customer due to a "larger than normal" network roundtrip time.

Regards
Axel

Re: Alfresco startup takes more than 30 min.

andrewjones — Wed, 10 Feb 2016 09:29:00 GMT

Hi there,

I have same problem - alfresco is ready to work after 48min!

I have no idea how to speed up this process

How exactly I can disable schema validation? I was going through alfresco-global.properties configuration file but no clue there.

Thanks

Re: Alfresco startup takes more than 30 min.

andrewjones — Wed, 10 Feb 2016 09:41:32 GMT

Re: Alfresco startup takes more than 30 min.

afaust — Wed, 10 Feb 2016 17:02:27 GMT

See the documentation about <a href="http://docs.alfresco.com/4.2/concepts/maincomponents-disable.html">disabling Alfresco features</a>. Schema validation is part of the schema update feature.

Re: Alfresco startup takes more than 30 min.

andrewjones — Thu, 11 Feb 2016 09:04:56 GMT

Hi Axel,

thanks for fast answer. Just to be 100% sure is it db.schema.update=false? In documentation there is info: " Specifies whether the system bootstrap should create or upgrade the database schema automatically." - I'm not quite sure is it about schema validation?

Thanks

Re: Alfresco startup takes more than 30 min.

mrogers — Thu, 11 Feb 2016 14:03:00 GMT

No that is not schema validation, as far as I can see there is no property to control schema validation.   However schema validation does run after an upgrade so turning off upgrade also turns off the validation after the upgrade.

However you shouldn't be upgrading every time you start alfresco, that's an abnormal condition.

Are you sure you are seeing exactly the same problem as the OP?   With an old version of alfresco and the same community oracle plug in?

Alfresco startup typically takes a couple of minutes. It can take longer on first start up and during an upgrade when patches are running.
It can also take a long time rebuilding the lucene indexes if an inconsistency is detected.

Anything else is unexpected.   It can for example take far longer if you are trying to run alfresco with too little memory or if there are network connectivity issues.

Re: Alfresco startup takes more than 30 min.

andrewjones — Tue, 16 Feb 2016 07:47:00 GMT

Hi, Thanks for participation in this conversation. I have same issue as OP but in my case startup takes up to 45-50 minutes. I have no Idea what's the cause. I don't know if the data from NAGIOS client would be helpful - i.e. if I provide You info about moments when respective indicators are set on green (OK) status along with the repository logs?

Re: Alfresco startup takes more than 30 min.

afaust — Tue, 16 Feb 2016 08:27:55 GMT

Hello,

the most useful items for analyzing long startup times are the alfresco.log and any SQL profiling data you can gather. It is important to identify which parts of the startup are taking what percentages of the total time. I.e. there are also some features of Alfresco that pro-actively traverse / cache data structures that may delay startup due to sheer amount of data to process (and potentially cold DB caches), such as IMAP server functionality which as far as I remember caches the folder structure.
I don't believe Nagios will provide much interesting data apart from CPU / memory / network utilisation which might indicate resource bottlenecks in your configuration. But simply when what status changes to green should be too abstract for any meaningful analysis.

Regards
Axel