Hummingbird (Opentext) running on W2K3SP1 Citrix PS4E, in the Application Installation & Compatibility forum on BrianMadden.com

Hi guys

Does anyone out there run Hummingbird on Terminal Services / Citrix PS4E?

I am having big problems with it crashing all the time. (DM.exe needs to be terminated then everything comes back from to life)

My systems are the following

Windows 2003 SP1 Terminal Servers with Citrix PS4E
6 x DL380 High Spec servers. (3.6 Xeon 2MB, 4GB RAM etc)
130 Users
Office 2003 with latest patches
Hummingbird 5.1.0.5 SR6 MR2

We have to end DM.exe all the time as office / hummingbird stop responding. We have had Hummingbird consultants over and they have not made any useful suggestions. The issue happeneds to random people, random times. Does not matter if only 5 people or 20 people are logged on to that server. No event logs errors nothing.

Anyone got any tips out there for running Hummingbird. (Dont say roll out pc's) :-)

Kind regards

Carl

Hi Carl,

130 users per machine is probably stretching things a bit thin in terms of kernel resources but I guess it depends on what your users are doing. How much free memory do you have left with this number of users on a server. If Office/DM is hanging at random, do you get the same number of hangs when there are only 40-50 users on a server?

Since you've got CPS4E, are you using memory optimization? What happens if you exclude DM.exe from the optimization (exclusion list via farm properties memory optimization in CMC). Does the latest version of DM have any .Net modules?

What have the Hummingbird consultants done? User application dumps of hung Office/DM instances so they can find out what's hanging?

Is there any type of activity that can reproducibly hang office?

I haven't got any magic answer for you yet, except to point out that HUmmingbird can run okay on TS/Citrix and it's be interesting to see what's pushing things over the edge on your site.

regards,

Rick

Hi Carl,

Was starting to think it was just me who had troubles with DM.exe. I'll give you the details of the issue we are having and the steps we have gone through to try to resolve it:

DM.exe will run fine most of the time but randomly what seems to happen is DM.exe tries to close (either because there is no integrated app open or whatever) the icon then disappears from the system tray but the process dm.exe remains in the process list. This doesn’t crash the office app but does prevent the user from opening or saving documents.

This problem commonly happens when the user opens references to hummingbird documents from emails within outlook although this is not been confirmed as the only time it happens.

Killing the process as in your case fixes the issue untill next time.

Suggestions from hummingbird consultants were:
-Remove Interceptor from citrix servers
-Turn off Data Execution Prevention
-Stop ctfmon.exe from running

The current course of investigation is now looking at FOLB as this doesn’t seem to work as it should and may be causing the issue. But we have been unable to solve the issue as yet. Interested to hear what suggestions hummingbird gave you.

Have you been able to resolve it yet?

justin

Did anyone ever figure out a solution to this?

Actually have a hummingbird consultant with me atm will let you know how it goes.

We're having the same problem (running DM 5105 SR6 MR2). If you haven't opened an incident with Hummingbird/OpenText, please call them and let them know there's a problem! The more reports they get, the faster they'll escalate (and hopefully fix) it.

Hi fellow problem victims,

I was very much surprised (not really!!!) to see, that you have these kind of problems with DM version 5.1.0.5 (with or without SR6) of Hummingbird (OpenText). Because we have exactly the same problems with this application as you seem to have: crashing of DM.EXE (loss of connection). Random and not (deliberately) reproducible.

We (200 Users) are running Windows 2003 server (no citrix !), brand new Dell hardware and infrastructure, Windows XP, Office XP with all patches. Everything ample within the specs of Hummingbird. And we have this problem since december 2004 !

In the mean time Hummingbird consultants (involved as of march 2005) have always pointed at other possible causes outside the application itself: They first blamed our infrastructure (which we have COMPLETELY rebuild in February 2006), then our Word-macro’s (which in the mean time we have disabled). But nothing worked. They re-installed DM. They reconfigured DM. They installed DM with ODMA integration, and with COM integration. Nothing worked. And they kept telling us, that we were the only customer, who experienced these kind of problems. They had no information that other clients also experienced these kind of problems.

Even when we discovered (two months ago) that another Company here in Amsterdam experienced the same problems, they qualified it as “a coincidence”. Even last week (February 23th 2007), after reading your contribution to this Forum, I specifically asked the manager of OpenText Benelux, if this was a “Known Error”, also experienced by other customers. His reply on February 23th) was: “That I cannot answer just like that. If there are similar cases, it would be known to us, but it isn’t. In any case each problem stands on itself (also yours). This is something Our support team needs to investigate further.” Strange, don’t you think? Because I deduce from your contribution to this Forum, that the Hummingbird/OpenText consultants have paid you several visits as well !

Anyway… The problem with a crashing DM is only 1 of the (many) problems we have. Another is a problem with the index server (keeps “busy”). It’s not possible do a Full-Text-Search. These are the major problems. And the company I told you about earlier has also a problem with Zero-Byte-Files (Documents are suddenly totally empty! Has probably something to do with Dynamic Profiling and/or Round Robin and is still not solved).

In march we expect the SWAT-team from OpenText. I’m curious to what they are going to do and say!

Kind regards,

Bert Vos
Amsterdam

Hi Guys

Sorry I have not provided any feedback sooner.

Justin. Your issues match ours. Very interesting. Especially with opening links from emails etc. I have already gone through the Microsoft document on making sure CTFMON does not run. I am interested in the FOLB settings because we had big issues with this due to DCom settings (Windows 2003 SP1) and were not able to failover. (We only use a secondary server if the primary is down) Also do you have multiple libraries? We must have multiple libraries because of some legal reasons.

We have completed some further investigation into the issues but not really got very far. We have identified that the DM viewer either from explorer of within outlook appears to have a memory leak. If you view a document you can see the memory usage increasing and it does not appear to release it. This has been raised with Open text but no feedback yet!

We have noticed that our test systems seem to be more stable than the live systems but there are still crashes etc. To quickly summarise our test build

· Windows 2003 SP1 with Windows updates as of mid feb 2007
· Citrix Presentation Server 4 Enterprise with updates as of mid Feb 2007
· Office 2003 SP2 with updates as of mid feb 2007
· Hummingbird 5.1.0.5 SR6 MR2 with Com+ Integration
· We use Dynamic profiles & folders
· 4 library’s configured

Still waiting on some feedback from Hummingbird / Opentext so I will post a further update soon. If anyone gets anywhere please let me know.

Thanks for everyone’s feedback and responses.

Kind regards

Carl

Hello Carl,

I realize this post is quite dated and you have no doubt upgraded to a different version or app, but I would really appreciate it if you could let me know if you ever resolved this as we are still stuck for a couple of years with no upgrade option.

We are still running DM 5.1 in a Terminal Server environment on Windows 2003 32-bit Server and are experiencing exactly what is described in this post, notably dm.exe hanging and having to end task on it and relaunch Hummingbird to continue.

We have tried all the suggestions and the stability has improved, but we have not been able to completely eliminate the problem.

Thank you so much for taking the time to reply.

Justin, I would sure appreciate it if you could let me know if you resolved these issues.