[acs] Eportal and BM system issues can't get a response from serco support

[robk]

We have been running eportal for a number of years, and have never been too happy with the speed and reliability of eportal. We have also brought into the new behavour management system which is causing interesting issues.

 

At times of heavy load (week before report deadlines) we find that eportal completely stops working with tomcat hitting 100% cpu, this is usually after a few hours of the school being open. Our eportal server does a complete restart at 3am every day to attempt to get a clean days run.

 

Admin logons can take anything up to 60 seconds, and we regually see messages such as "not a school day" when it is!

 

The BM system has taken to emailing room booking alerts to staff even though we don`t have the room booking module.

 

Our system is installed on two servers, a HP DL360 with the database and facility server (4gb ram, Dual Xeon 5130 2GHz processor SAS raid array for the data)

and a HP DL320 with eportal installed (4gb ram, Dual Xeon 3050 2Ghz processor and Mirrored Sata drive)

 

Although the eportal server is not that stellar in performace Serco seem to be happy with the hardware spec.

 

Is anyone else seeing simalar problems, or even better know any solutions?

 

I have had many support tickets open with serco on this issue, which they seem to close by sending me a "troubleshooting eportal performance" document, even if I start the call with I have tried the info in the troubleshooting document....

 

Currently I have several tickets open with no sign of serco getting in touch with me. Not a good state of affairs.

 

RobK

[kmount]

Never used eportal but I have tomcat and it likes it's resources.

 

How many users are you supporting on the DL320 and what kind of resource usage is it showing?

[robk]

60-100 users ave, tomcat seemed to be eating memory so we doubled the ram before adding the BM system (as we knew that eat resources as well).

 

CPU tends to be 50% plus untill it locks at 100%.

[michael2k6]

Rob,

 

Sorry to hear you're struggling. I will be in touch outside of this discussion to dicuss how we move forward.

 

Regards

Mic @ Serco

[Banjo]

60-100 users ave, tomcat seemed to be eating memory so we doubled the ram before adding the BM system (as we knew that eat resources as well).

 

CPU tends to be 50% plus untill it locks at 100%.

 

From experience eportal does like it's clock speed. We have found that a higher clocked single chip works better that a 'dual chip' system of a lower clock speed when you spilt ePortal from the database.

[themightymrp]

Did you ever resolve this issue? We are experiencing the exact same thing here. We added the BM module in September but over the past 2 - 3 weeks the speed has dropped remarkably and we regularly get the 100% CPU usage problem. Serco sent me the same document which pointed at things we had already tried. We have even tried a new NIC in case that was faulty. HELP!! We have auto-restarts every morning at 5am but are still having to manually do it twice a day when it locks up.

 

Cheers

 

EDIT : I will mention that we upgraded to the latest 11.3 to see if that would cure it but no such luck

Edited December 12, 2011 by themightymrp
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[michael2k6]

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