All sorts of errors / slowness in my solution

Classic Servoy
1

Hi all

I have a solution which is being rolled out to a client and now that we’ve got it on their server, we’re finding all kinds of weird bugs we haven’t seen before. We’re at a loss as to what is going wrong

First the solution has become AMAZINGLY slow, we have a drop down menu which does differing searches in an unrelated tabpanel (the drop down changing for eg to Appliances will only show line items for this sale which are appliances etc.) Seemed to work fine when used locally, but has locked up since putting it on the server (loading a record with all line items can take 30 seconds for 60 line items.). In addition to being slow, Servoy Smart Client often locks up entirely and needs to be force quit.

Second thing is that in the log we have many many “signalling channel lost when reading pings” and “signalling channel lost when reading pings or client export notifies” errors. To solve this I have reduced the RMI timeout from 120 to 10 (as per Johan’s suggestion in another post about this problem), not solved it

I’m sure it is a programming error on my part, but I don’t know where to look. It was quite a difficult solution to put together and I perhaps had my Filemaker hat on a little in building it. It also didn’t seem to misbehave while in development

Sadly, when compared to the filemaker solution that it is replacing, it acts pretty weird and is comparitively VERY slow…

Be grateful for any ideas on where to start looking. I have gone over my methods and cannot find anything completely out of the ordinary.

If it makes any difference, Servoy developer seems NOT to have these problems, i.e. not working across the (wan) network seems to be normal. Setting up servoy server has been the same (default settings) as all of our other ones so I can’t think what might be affecting it…

Thanks

Bevil

2

It doesn’t sound easy to help you, but we can try to fugure out some stuff:

  1. the signal lost errors could point to a network problem (clients cannot be seen for a while). While this doesn’t have to be a problem, it is not ideal.
  2. Have you checked the server log via servoy-admin? Is there anything interesting?
  3. At some user’s machines you could turn on Java tracing and have a look at their traces to see if something goes wrong (being very slow sounds a bit like a calculation problem)
  4. What database is it? Is it the same as during development?

Patrick

3

Hi Bevil,

to help out we need a bit more info.
what platform clients and server?
what java?
memory settings of client if running extra plugins?
which database server?

one, site, multisite etc.
how many clients?

is this affectling all forms or forms with lots of related tab panels?
first display of forms or always?

We have a solution here where the PostgreSQL database is lightning fast, but there is a noticable wait to load records into a handful of our 200+ forms…

4

Hi Christian and Patrick, thanks for the replies

Sorry, I should have said… Its Servoy 3.1.4 (server) on an intel iMac with java 1.5.0_07. Clients are the same more or less. No extra plugins. Memory on client is 256 (defined by Servoy Server settings). It is Sybase 9. One site primarily and it seems that the crashing / slowness is most extreme when connecting to it over wan.

So far only one client. It is not stable enough to roll it out to more. It seems only to affect a couple of forms, one of these has a tab which collates line items for this ‘sale’ these line items are not in a related tabpanel but rather an unrelated tabpanel with a search done depending on which group of items they want to see (eg. appliances, worktops, furniture etc. to shorten the list of line items as well as provide group figures.). It happens always.

Thanks

Bevil

5

Hi Bevil

Couple of things that might be helpful:

  • double check calculations: I have had locking/slowdowns on Macs due to Calc errors - OSX is much ‘pickier’ than Windows esp on calcs using relationships that return a null

  • have you tried accessing from outside the Clients normal LAN/WAN - ie using remote WiFi connection or even hosting somewhere else temorarily, it could be that its them and not you :)

Let us know how you get on

Regards

Graham Greensall
Worxinfo Ltd

6

It really sounds like an unstable connection. In my FM days, a single connection drop meant connection lost with “manual recovery”. At least Servoy clients recover nicely after drops, even after you put your system to sleep. But sometimes things don’t behave right then. After all, I believe that is forgivable for a client/server app. But from what I hear, I’d say it’s a connection issue. We have a client with bad cables and lot’s of trouble. But: checking everything closely and eleminating issues in calculations really improved things a lot. That is the reason I asked for trace files from the client. Errors in calcs usually appear there. Also look closely for the warning icon in the lower left corner.

Patrick