Appendix A: Troubleshooting server performance and stability

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Determine the extent of the problem. Answer the following questions, looking for patterns and shared factors:

• Does the issue appear to be limited to the server or does it seem to originate on the client computers?
• How many and which computers are affected?
• Does it affect all vaults or only one?
• Can you reproduce the problem?
• When did the symptoms first occur?
• Do symptoms occur consistently throughout the day or only during certain periods?

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Configure the Windows Performance Monitor

Configuring the Windows Performance Monitor

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Verify that the affected computers meet or exceed the system requirements

Understanding system requirements for the Meridian server

Understanding system requirements for Meridian clients

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Ensure that sufficient physical memory, virtual memory, and free disk space are available on both the server and client computers.  For the server computer, it is very important that the AMEDMW.exe server process has enough memory available to prevent memory and performance issues. This also applies to virtual environments such as VMWare.

Use the Windows Performance Monitor to track memory usage over time to determine the peak server load times and to monitor memory and available disk space. We recommend using Performance Monitor instead of Task Manager because the Performance Monitor is more accurate, provides much more information, and the information can be logged for further analysis.

Understanding the effects of the CPU

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System resources can be improved by server operating system configuration, for example, taking advantage of the /3GB switch. This allows you to allocate 3GB of virtual memory for applications and 1GB for the operating system. You may also be able to use the Meridian High Performance Option.

Configuring the High Performance Option

Configuring the High Performance Option

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If the vault cache settings are set correctly and you are still experiencing performance issues, try to reproduce the issue in a new Hypertrieve vault located on the same server. Make sure that the vault has no Visual Basic extensions or VBScript event code configured. If the issue is not reproducible, the cause of the issue may be the configuration of the problem vault. If the database engine of the vault is SQL Server or Oracle, contact the database administrator to check the database configuration. Both SQL Server and Oracle have several settings that can affect the amount of memory consumed by a database. These can affect the amount of available memory on the server computer.

Optimizing vault performance

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If the issue can still be reproduced at this point, the issue may be related to the network, SAN/NAS storage, or server computer hardware performance.

For simple network diagnostics, run the Diagnostics command on the Tools menu in PowerUser from a client computer. This command will measure the current latency and bandwidth of your network. Run several tests and average the results. Also run the tests at various times during the day that are representative of low and high server demand. It can also be run on the server computer and the results compared to that of a client computer to determine the overhead imposed by the network.

If the vault files reside on a SAN or NAS device, see if the performance issue is resolved if the content (streams) files are relocated to the Meridian server computer.

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As a final check, test if the issue is reproducible on a test server. From our experience, performance and stability issues can be sometimes be related to malfunctioning hardware that is difficult to diagnose.