Basic Minimum Requirements for Alfresco

[bsawler]

Hi,

I was looking for the minimum requirements to run Alfresco, cause I have had Alfresco up and running on my project for about 3 weeks and yesterday it 'crashed'

I have Alfresco 2.0 Community running on a Win2003 server, with about 3GB of RAM and there in only one server in the office which it runs the mail, internet and about 50 computers.  I am a Mechanical Engineer and know very little about servers, networks etc, but I need Alfresco for my Project, and I have no IT support. 

Out of the blue I executed a command in firefox and watch in the status bar "Waiting for server" which usually lasts about 5 seconds this week on for 5 minutes, so I know something was wrong.  I checked the server and from the task manager it was running at 1.5GB of RAM.  I then went to "Stop Alfresco" and it said waiting to deallocate 18 instances (or something similar)  and after 10 minutes this message did not go away on the tomcat so I killed it and then "Start Alfresco" and all worked fine for the last 2 days.  Now another 20 or so users will be connecting, plus possible another 50 or so later on.

Since I am not a technical wiz on the computer, could I get a rule of thumb for the hardware and software required to run say 25-50 instances of Alfresco at one time?  

Thanks,
Bradley

[steve]

Hi,

Do you have any ERRORs in your 'alfresco.log' file?

Steve

[bsawler]

Steve,

I looked through the one days log file and I got the following errors about 300 times over but they seem like minor errors from the user etc.

08:24:43,578 ERROR [org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.[Catalina].[localhost].[/alfresco].[Faces Servlet]] Servlet.service() for servlet Faces Servlet threw exception
java.lang.NullPointerException
   at org.apache.catalina.valves.ErrorReportValve.invoke(ErrorReportValve.java:105)   

10:12:07,218 ERROR [org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.[Catalina].[localhost].[/alfresco].[Faces Servlet]] Servlet.service() for servlet Faces Servlet threw exception
java.lang.NullPointerException   
   at org.apache.catalina.valves.ErrorReportValve.invoke(ErrorReportValve.java:105)   

10:14:41,734 WARN  [org.springframework.util.FileCopyUtils] Could not close OutputStream
ClientAbortException:  java.net.SocketException: Connection reset by peer: socket write error
   at org.apache.catalina.valves.ErrorReportValve.invoke(ErrorReportValve.java:105)


11:22:45,875 ERROR [org.alfresco.repo.action.executer.MailActionExecuter] Failed to send email to null
org.springframework.mail.MailPreparationException: Could not prepare mail: null; nested exception is java.lang.NullPointerException: null
java.lang.NullPointerException
   at org.apache.catalina.valves.ErrorReportValve.invoke(ErrorReportValve.java:105)
   

11:34:38,078 WARN  [org.springframework.util.FileCopyUtils] Could not close OutputStream
ClientAbortException:  java.net.SocketException: Connection reset by peer: socket write error
   at org.apache.catalina.valves.ErrorReportValve.invoke(ErrorReportValve.java:105)


13:08:59,406 ERROR [org.alfresco.util.transaction.SpringAwareUserTransaction] Transaction didn't commit
org.alfresco.repo.security.permissions.AccessDeniedException: Access Denied.  You do not have the appropriate permissions to perform this operation.
   at org.apache.catalina.valves.ErrorReportValve.invoke(ErrorReportValve.java:105)‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍‍

Now I checked the server and the windows task Manager and the memory is 2.6GB and the PF Usage was committing total of 2.1GB.  When I checked under processes Java.exe was running at about 160MB, and when I stopped the server it said that is was disallocating 60 instances.  The memory went down by about 160MB.  Now it is my understanding that Alfresco is only using about 160MB of memory which to me is quite small cause my laptop uses 100MB to run firefox alone! 

I hope my understanding is correct and that Alfresco is only using 160MB of recourses.  Now the contractor is going to install a new server with upgraded memory but I don't know how to back up my Alfresco, cause I installed 2.0 Community with the HSQL database and the documentation is on backup is for mysql and is a little vague, and I do not want to lose my database.

Now I will search the forum for backups and restores.

Thanks,
Bradley