[FX.php List] FMS Server Console gets whacky/ CWP fails under IIS

[Jonathan Schwartz]

Hi Folks,

I have a client who has experienced long term, persistent failures of 
CWP on a regular basis.  I'm looking for answers.

The environment is Windows Server 2008 running on a single 64 bit 
machine with 8GB ram. The FileMaker solution is 5GB or so, and used 
by an office staff of 15-20 or so.  In addition to the native 
FileMaker users, the system supports a busy web site that handles 
approximately 30,000 transactions per day.  I know that FMI 
recommends a multiple machine deployment, but the problem may or may 
not be related to that.

This deployment uses the API, but I'm not sure if that matters.

Every so often, Custom Web Publishing stops communicating, generating 
error 22...an error that doesn't appear on any lists that I found so 
far.  With the error, all web pages that require CWP stop responding, 
although IIS does display the html.

When consulting the Server Console, we find that the Console is a bit 
confused.  It displays green indicators for Server and Web Server in 
the middle of the page. However, the Start and Stop buttons on the 
upper left say otherwise.  The Start Server button is active and can 
be clicked...although it doesn't do anything.  The Web Server buttons 
suggest that the Web engine is working..but it isn't really.

When the problem occurs, we need to perform some or all of the following steps:
	- Stop/Start IIS
	- Stop/Start the hardware
	- Redeploy FileMaker Web  Publishing

One clue that we have observed is what appears to be a memory leak. 
Memory usage steadily grows from under 2GB upon restart to 5GB and 
higher over a day's time.  We don't know what is leaking.

My involvement in this project is solely the Web Publishing portion.

My area of concern is for PHP session data that might be contributing 
to the problem. I use sessions to store variables that are employed 
throughout the user session. I destroy sessions when a user reaches 
an end point in the system. However, some subsystems do not have end 
points, so I rely on PHP to end the session and do garbage 
collection.  I can not confirm that that is actually happening. 
Windows is not my strong suit.

I have the opportunity to completely eliminate sessions from the PHP 
programming, relying  on POST and GET to pass key fields from page to 
page and perform queries to retrieve data that I currently use 
sessions to store.

I would do this if I had any confidence that this was the cause of 
the problem...which I don't.

So, my questions are:

Does anyone else experience regular failures of Windows based CWP?
Are there any special recommendations to keep sessions-related memory 
under control?
Anything else?

Thanks

Jonathan






-- 
Jonathan Schwartz
Exit 445 Group
jonathan at exit445.com
http://www.exit445.com
415-370-5011