SIMS crashing

[Badzeye]

Hello all,

 

over the past week weve been having some problems with SIMS when users try to open registers SIMS crashes, trying to run reports is the same thing and some users cant even open the application without it crashing. Strange that its only been happening since last thursday but I cant seem to figure out whats wrong with it.

 

Server resources are fine and its been rebooted. Ive done fresh installs on clients and still have the same issues. Any of you experianced anything similar to this?

[pete]

• What changed on Wednesday / Thursday? Solus patch? Windows patch? SIMS administrator changing something? Errors in the SQL log? Event logs? Antivirus definition/update causing daft things to happen or a part of SIMS to be quarantined?
  
• What error(s) is it throwing up when it crashes? Generic .Net, generic SIMS permissions error, another code?
  
• Have you poked Capita / whoever provides your 3rd-party SIMS support?
  

[minimoo]

is sims showing a dialog to say why it crashed? if so, what's in the strack trace of that - or similarly, what is event log showing when it crashes?

[Badzeye]

Just showing an application hang. Weirdly if you cause windows to show the application is unresponsive would you like to recover it message it recovers and works fine for the rest of the session.

[caffrey]

What's in the event log ? I've had a machine here I'm trying to fix and its a .net problem (Sims didn't even attempt to load)

[pete]

Is pulsar.exe showing as waiting on another process when you analyze the wait chain?

 

(Right-click the process in taskmanager in Win 10. In Win 7 launch resource monitor and then do the same).

Edited February 16, 2017 by pete

[Meldrew]

How big is your database on the server? How much free space for your database/log files (depending on if you have these split on different drives)?

 

Meldrew

[Banjo]

Try doing all of those things on the server during a busy period of the day. If it works then it's not the SIMS/DB installation but something on the networking side.

[jinnantonnixx]

What's the message when SIMS crashes? It will be either an handled exception, or more likely, an unhandled exception message.

 

I use WinDbg for getting to the root problems with exceptions. When SIMS crashes, do not acknowledge or clear any error dialogues. Instead, open Task Manager, select the Pulsar process and right-click and choose Create Dump File. This will create a DMP file.

Download WinDbg from Microsoft and open your DMP file in WinDbg.

In the WinDbg window, type !analyze -v which should download the public symbol set and display the exception details. Quite often the problem is highlighted quickly with this method.

[Priya_Shah]

Hi

 

We had a school with this problem recently, the solution was a simple one, just not an obvious one.

 

You need to go to Routine | School | Edit Academic Year within SIMS

 

Select the Current Academic Year, then just press Next until the routine finishes (don't make any changes to the year itself).

 

I applied this fix at a secondary school and it took almost 12 hours to complete. If possible, start the process in the evening, once all users have signed out.

 

Once the routine has finished, validate memberships, and all should work as normal.

[ollieonline]

Sims crashes with viewing registers etc has in the past been caused by a child missing a name or having 'illegal' characters in their name. If it's only happening with one particular group of students make sure your data is clean.

[coolhands]

just a bump as I had this today. Tried the edit academic year as above, applied timetable, then I changed one day and applied timetable again then changed it back and re-applied! to make sure it registered a change as I thought it must be that. Exported all student names (whole school!) and checked for non alphanumeric characters, it wasn't that. Anyway finally ran Validate Memberships and it solved the problem. Which is annoying as over the last few weeks I frequently run validate memberships and update course memberships etc as I do all the pastoral promotion and academic promotion etc. I think the timetabler must have changed something I don't know, maybe added in a lesson somewhere, that caused this.

 

by the way use =SUMPRODUCT(SEARCH(MID(A41,ROW(INDIRECT("1:"&LEN(A41))),1),"abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz")) in excel to check names if you need to do this. I did for legal and preferred surnams, forenames and middle names to look for anomolies.