[acs] Serco Facility / ePortal

[psydii]

So we're getting users saying that eportal is crashing. To be litteral for a moment, it clearly isn't, but it is next to impossible to get end users to differentiate between 'no error message, but your work vanishes', 'an in web app error, and your work is lost' 'internet explorer crashing and your work is lost' and 'website internal error and your work is lost'. Anyhow ePortal/Tomcat are clearly still running well from the perspective of most of my users.

 

In general it seems their browser isn't crashing, so the next thing is to look at the connectivity logs on the server... Any way of turning on detailed logging in tomcat to see what might be going on?

 

Cheers

P.

Edited November 23, 2011 by psydii
typo

[Oaktech]

we have this, it seems to go in spates, we will have people unable to take registers in the morning, we'll restart the apropriate services on the server and it will be stable for days, and then it'll become un relaible for a few days and we'll have to restart services every morning for the duration, and then it'll be fine for months. we've raised it with serco and they have essentially just told us to live with it!

[smalls001]

I have setup a schedule task that resets the data Facility server service and the Facility Eportal every morning, can't find a true solution.. but this works.

[psydii]

Hmm. We restart ePortal every night, since it only pulls information like on/off roll or addresses on startup. Which is a bit rubbish really.

 

There is a Serco Document that recommends this as best practice. I think it is the Troubleshooting guide, which is only available on request/merit.

[john]

It has always been recommended for a long time to have a daily stop / start of the services behind ePortal and its still advisable as it gives it a nice clean slate for the day, however with newer releases things have improved and got better with time so its less required but still very much recommended

[ANiceEnglishman]

We had his happen for a long time until we upgraded our server from 4GB to 8GB RAM. The problem was worst when teachers were entering assessment data (reports to parents).

 

I read somewhere that the version of Tomcat used has a memory leak. As others have posted the workaround is to schedule a restart of the ePortal services in the middle of the night.

[Tallwood_6]

As John says a scheduled stop and start of the services in the early hours has always been recommended.