Date:  12/22/2014 11:28:02 AM Msg ID:  004755
From:  Steve Moore Thread:  004755
Subject:  Foxweb sluggish after mass file copy
Happy holidays!

I have a Foxweb installation that has been running for almost 15 years. It is a fairly large installation that manages literally hundreds of thousands of files. The site gets 100,000+ requests a day. Many of the routines manipulate dozens or even hundreds of databases and index files in a single request.

Every night the system performs a file by file backup, copying hundreds of thousands of files from one server to another. This takes about 15 minutes. During this time the Foxweb scripts themselves return a maintenance message and do not attempt to access the files being copied.

Immediately after finishing the backup, Foxweb becomes extremely sluggish. Scripts that normally take less than a second to complete eventually timeout even with a longer timeout period such as 60 seconds. Eventually after the timeout Foxweb will kill the channels and restart them. There are no errors returned. This goes on for approximately 5 minutes and a couple of hundred requests, after which everything returns to normal and Foxweb requests resume normally performance, executing in fractions of a second.

The exact same requests that timeout immediately after the backup run normally and there are no further problems until the following evening after the next backup. There are no errors or warning messages reported in Foxweb or in the server logs that I can find.
 
The problem seems to be isolated to Foxweb as other web server functions do not seem to be degraded.
 
I have experimented with any number of processes to try and determine what is causing the issue. I've tried stopping and restarting the service, pausing for some time after the backup completes before resuming FoxWeb processing, and other off-the-wall methods, but I've been unable to find a workaround. The only thing I can come up with is that the process of copying that many files is messing with server buffers and/or page files?

Anyone have any ideas?

Thanks in advance for any help. Have a Merry Christmas and a happy new year.