Constant Freezing of Alfresco WebDAV, CIFS, and Web Portal

[scottcarson]

Hi all,

I've scoured the forum for months and I'm at wits end. I've got a few clients in production environments who are all having this problem and so it's critical that it get fixed.

My company builds servers designed and optimized for Alfresco Community, running kubuntu with a minimum 3.0Ghz and 4GB RAM. A few months ago, we experienced random freezing of CIFS so I posted it to the bugs and it's being worked on for next RC. In the meantime, we just used web portal and WebDAV. However, recently even those are freezing after running for about 12 hours, which leads me to wonder if it's more. Sidebar: every server is the exact same - the only difference is the user files that reside.

I have tweaked and played with Java memory settings for days. I just read a post that said the problem has to do with systems that have a lot a of files, claiming that the file listing is loaded into memory and upon refresh it overloads the listing/buffers and seizes up. That makes sense as there are at least 100,000 files on each server. Can anybody give other suggestions and/or options and/or a solution as to why this is happening?

Thanks so much in advance,
-Scott.

[harrild]

Scott,
We are in the process of deploying Alfresco but the symtoms you describe are similar to those we are experiencing with an unrelated application using Novell Netware file servers. We've found that when the request, e.g. writing a file to a share, from an automated process within a client and the file is very large, the buffer on the file server which is hosting the share, fills it's buffer to handle the load then runs out of buffer, causing the automated write to fail with no errors present on either the client or server operating systems. The client process, i.e. the application that is executing the automated process, might log an error.

I haven't encountered this problem when performing this function within an interactive session. Also, we haven't, to do, seen this behaviour when the server hosting the share is a 64bit operating system.

Having said that, the Novell Netware is 32bit and using CIFS (TCP 139) but our 64bit clients are running either Linux or Windows Server (majority) and using SMB (TCP 445). Is your CIFS server running samba or is it a Windows box?

-Cy