How stable really is Alfresco?

[comozoi]

Hello!
I am currently testing Alfresco for deployment in public administration organizations. I was very impressed by the presentations of the product had high hopes, but the more I am testing, it the more my dissapointment and uncertainty grow.
Don't get me wrong, I am impressed with the functional and usability features, the possibilities of extending and customizing it as well as the future development plans for this software project.
My concern is related to the stability of the system which worried me after a line of errors and unexpected crashes.

I tested Alfresco in version 1.2.0 on a Windows XP system with the jboss package and also on Linux (Fedora C 2) with the Tomcat package.
Here is a list of errors I received:
1. On a bulk folder transfer,  Webdav Transfer Error, causing also a severe server crash.
Clean re-install needed.
2. Webdav file transfer speed is vey slow (compared to a similar beta functionality for a Groupware (PHP) with no "ECM pretentions")
3. Transfer Error when doing a Bulk transfer through webdav, for some files.
4. Manually running actions on a file crashes the system after adding several aspects to the files.
Clean re-install needed.
5. Cuting a file from a space and pasting it in a subspace sometimes does not function and crashes the server.
Clean re-install needed.

The problem is, that all errors caused a severe server crash.

I wonder if Alfresco is really fit for enterprise use….
I am still hoping.

[kevinr]

I suspect most of your crashing issues are related to a known issue with the Hibernate library on the Linux Sun Hotspot JVM:
http://forums.alfresco.com/viewtopic.php?t=1178
The article above includes a work-around for now.

If the above does not fix your issues then it may be a problem with your specific setup - it's very strange that you require a "clean install"? I only say this as we have tested Alfresco 1.2 with >100 concurrent users all hammering the system for several days continuously with no problems! We also have customers using 1.2 without seeing the issues you are getting.

Thanks,

Kevin

[kevinr]

Can you also check which Sun JVM you are using on Windows/Linux?

http://forums.alfresco.com/viewtopic.php?t=856

As the latest 1.5_06 version has a HotSpot compiler issue but I wouldn't think that would cause the problem if you are using a downloaded bundle as we deal with that issue.

Thanks,

Kevin

[gary_spencer]

Hi,

When you say 'server crash' do you mean the JVM crashes out or there are errors logged in the Alfresco.log file ?. Could you email me any crash logs and the Alfresco.log file.

Thanks

Gary

[comozoi]

Hi. I appreciate the quick and professional reaction.
Also sorry for the fuzy expressions. Clean install means that redeploying the package is needed in order to run alfresco.
Otherwise - server error, or server starts, but with login problems (user login data not accepted).

I will send the last logs I kept on Windows and Linux.

I will also continue the testing these days, hoping that finetuning the configuration will solve issues.

Thank you.

[kevinr]

No problem, we'd like to get to the bottom of the issues

Can i just check that you didn't share a database instance between the 2 test machines? e.g. the full-text indexes (stored on the alfresco server) need to be kept in sync with the DB - so you cannot point two different alfresco servers at the same DB unless you have correctly enabled clustering. I'm just guessing as a reason for the login issue you mention.

Thanks,

Kevin

[kevinr]

Hi,

I've take a quick look at the log files you sent to us. A couple of things that will help immediately:

The cause of your slow WebDav etc. performance is probably this:

20:43:02,719 WARN  [org.alfresco.service.descriptor.DescriptorService] Alfresco JVM - WARNING - maximum heap size 63.563MB is less than recommended 512MB
‍‍‍

You should set your JVM memory size in the JBoss bat/sh file to 512MB as the recommended heap size - otherwise there will be barely enough memory to start jboss + alfresco.

This error:

23:21:06,274 ERROR [org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.[Catalina].[localhost].[/alfresco].[Faces Servlet]] Servlet.service() for servlet Faces Servlet threw exception
java.lang.NoSuchMethodError: java.lang.Object.getHibernateLazyInitializer()Lorg/hibernate/proxy/LazyInitializer;
   at org.hibernate.proxy.HibernateProxy$$EnhancerByCGLIB$$45a55bcc.getHibernateLazyInitializer(<generated>)
‍‍‍‍‍

Is definintely the Hibernate issue I mentioned in the post above - it seems to be the root cause for the majority of exceptions - so that's the cause of a lot of the problems on Linux certainly.

Hope this helps with your testing,

Kevin