My VB6 program uses ADODB to do a lot of SQL (2000) CRUD.
Sometimes the network connection between the remote clients and the data center somehow "drops" resulting in the impossibility to establish new connections (so users launching the program can't use it).
The issue is the following:
Anyone who is using the program at the moment of the "drop" can continue using it with no issues whatoever, perform every operation, update data, read data, and everything seems like is working normally.
User then proceeds to fire up a "sum-up" report which lists everything that was done (before or after the "drop").
If we then check the database, all data regarding whatever was done after the network drop is not there. User goes back into the program and everything is as it was before the network drop.
It seems like all queries where somehow performed in-memory ? I'm at a loss about how to even approach the issue (I'm familiar enough with VB6 to work with the source code but I don't know a lot about ADODB).
I haven't yet tried to replicate the behavior due to limited customer's availability (development environment is housed in their offices), I'll try starting up the program from the IDE then rip out the network cable.
Provided I can replicate the issue, how do I fix this ? Is there some setting I'm not aware of ?
On a side note: the issue is sporadic (it happened a handful of times during the last year, and the software is being used heavily and on a daily basis by mutiple concurrent users).
After reading up on Disconnected Recordsets, it seems that's what's behind this odd behavior I'm experiencing.
This is not something that can be simply "turned off".
Related
We have a legacy VB6 app which has started, from time to time, hangs. We thought it may be to do with a shift to Citrix, but can now replicate the behaviour on a thick client on Win10. We don't think that we have seen this before on earlier Windows versions, but are still checking logs to confirm that.
We experience the behaviour when tabbing into a text box and then tabbing out. As we pass through it, we are making a simple ado call to lookup/validate some data in a text box. As part of the correct program running we are logging
“Opening Dataset: SELECT ... FROM ... ”
“Opened Dataset”
Between these 2 log statements is simple ado data retrieval code with which we have had no problems previously. It is in an ActiveX dll and is running synchronously. Most importantly is that between these 2 log statements there is no DoEvents or api call which would yield control. As far as we can see, it should be a purely synchronous operation.
When the system crashes, which happens sporadically, we can see other logging statements appear between these 2 which can be either resource status (e.g. how much memory, gdi/user objects - which would usually be found because a timer has triggered in the main form) or focus type events - which aren’t timer driven - at least in our codebase.
“Opening Dataset: SELECT ... FROM ... ”
“Resource Status: ...”
“Opened Dataset”```
or
“Opening Dataset: SELECT ... FROM ... ”
“TextItem.OnLostFocus Item1 ...”
“TextItem.Validate ...”
“TextItem.OnGotFocus Item2 ...
“Opened Dataset”
So my initial question is, in what scenario can what should be a synchronous operation be interrupted and appear to act asynchronously.
For example, and we aren’t doing this, I could imagine writing some unsafe code whereby by using a multimedia timer (on another thread) and supplying an AddressOf parameter to the address of a function on one of our modules, that that timer initiates execution of our code, separate to the correct control flow. Other than something like that, I just can’t see how synchronous vb6 code could be interrupted in this way.
I’d be really grateful of any thoughts, suggestions or advice. I’m really sorry if this is soo vague. It perhaps reflects how I’m struggling to get my head round this problem.
Just to say, we tracked this down to Windows 10 plus an old (out of support) socket component we are using. It looks like it is pumping the message queue "at the wrong time" and hence we are seeing UI events appear in the middle of a synchronous process. We don't see this behaviour on earlier Windows versions.
I don't know what may have changed in Win10 which would result in this, but we obviously need to upgrade.
In our case we had a few long running timers to pull status/changes from the DB which caused this. We are using ADO with SQL Native Client and MARS, which worked great up until Windows 10 where intermittent lock ups occurred. Logging and Windbg confirmed this was happening when 2 requests where hitting the ADO connection at the same time. The error from ADO was "Unable to open a logical session" error number -2147467259, and actually caused SQL Server 2014 (running on another machine) to block all other client queries from multiple different applications and machines until the locked up app was killed. I could not replicate this in the IDE as apparently that forces timers to work the way they always did. The fix was to async our ADO implementation and put a connection manager on top of the SQL connections to force requestors to wait their turn (basically taking the Win10 async'd timer feature back out). My only performance impact was the additional few milliseconds of delaying the timer fired SQL query when it collided with a another query.
I did some research on this one and seems to be an issue for some users.
Noticed that Laravel logs me out automatically and intermittently. It's quite hard to replicate but it happened twice in a demo/presentation which has impact as you understand.
I can imagine that sessions can be suspect nr1 for this one but whatever I tried didn't seem to work.
How did you overcome this issue?
https://github.com/laravel/framework/issues/7549
On rare occasions, the session file can become corrupted if one copy reads in a half written out file. This condition, however, is difficult to reproduces.
Laravel team member #GrahamCampbell:
This is known limitation of the file based session driver.
Using a different session driver should do the trick. (My preference tends to be Redis, but the database driver may be a bit easier to set up for a demo.)
We have for some time now been experiencing problems with data being saved in our SQL database.
Sometimes records are saved with data that does not match the rest of the row, making it seem like at some point, data is being 'swapped' for something else, perhaps, another user's data, before being passed to the database.
We do use TransactionScopes throughout with Isolation Level of ReadCommitted which makes me think the data integrity issue lies within the application rather than at the Database level.
We do use the session extensively and we are starting to think that the times of the corrupt data are similar to the times we deploy updates to the system during the day.
We do use the aspnet_state service to persist the session over application restarts.
Our users rely on terminal sessions therefore multiple users all log into the same server and launch the system via a browser.
We have in the past noticed users logging in with the same domain credentials but we are now relatively confident that users now log in with unique accounts.
99.9% of the data is correct but we have been struggling to understand what could be causing this intermittent data integrity issue.
We are now limiting our deploys to outside working hours on pain of death, but this is not always possible.
Can anyone shed light on why/how this might be happening?
EDIT: We have now isolated this to the DAL layer, see SQL query returns incorrect value in multi user environment
I have recently been fighting this!, and had similar problem to yours around 95% of the data written back was correct. I looked at various reasons why, the main culprit was some users on the network had downloaded Chrome and opening the record within Chrome, breaking our session id's as Chrome ignores sessions.
The other cause had been either the users was not closing the browser or not logging off the application allowing either the same user or completely different user to pick and use the session id.
After introducing a browser check and then reject Chrome, educating the users to make sure they log off, doing any updates to outside busy periods the problem was just about gone.
I forgot to mention, also on your IIS its best to turn off caching in the Output Caching, for the user and kernal set to prevent caching.
We have a JPA -> Hibernate -> Oracle setup, where we are only able to crank up to 22 transactions per seconds (two reads and one write per transaction). The CPU and disk and network are not bottlenecking.
Is there something I am missing? I wonder if there could be some sort of oracle imposed limit that the DBA's have applied?
Network is not the problem, as when I do raw reads on the table, i can do 2000 reads per second. The problem is clearly writes.
CPU is not the problem on the app server, the CPU is basically idling.
Disk is not the problem on the app server, the data is completely loaded into memory before the processing starts
Might be worth comparing performance with a different client technology (or even just a simple test using SQL*Plus) to see if you can beat this performance anyway - it may simply be an under-resourced or misconfigured database.
I'd also compare the results for SQLPlus running directly on the d/b server, to it running locally on whatever machine your Java code is running on (where it is communicating over SQLNet). This would confirm if the problem is below your Java tier.
To be honest there are so many layers between your JPA code and the database itself, diagnosing the cause is going to be fun . . . I recall one mysterious d/b performance problem resolved itself as a misconfigured network card - the DBAs were rightly insistent that the database wasn't showing any bottlenecks.
It sounds like the application is doing a transaction in a bit less than 0.05 seconds. If the SELECT and UPDATE statements are extracted from the app and run them by themselves, using SQL*Plus or some other tool, how long do they take, and if you add up the times for the statements do they come pretty near to 0.05? Where does the data come from that is used in the queries, and which eventually gets used in the UPDATE? It's entirely possible that the slowdown is not the database but somewhere else in the app, such a the data acquisition phase. Perhaps something like a profiler could be used to find out where the app is spending its time.
Share and enjoy.
We have a fairly standard client/server application built using MS RPC. Both client and server are implemented in C++. The client establishes a session to the server, then makes repeated calls to it over a period of time before finally closing the session.
Periodically, however, especially under heavy load conditions, we are seeing an RPC exception show up with code 1754: RPC_S_NOTHING_TO_EXPORT.
It appears that this happens in the middle of a session. The user is logged on for a while, making successful calls, then one of the calls inexplicably returns this error. As far as we can tell, the server receives no indication that anything went wrong - and it definitely doesn't see the call the client made.
The error code appears to have permanent implications, as well. Having the client retry the connection doesn't work, either. However, if the user has multiple user sessions active simultaneously between the same client and server, the other connections are unaffected.
In essence, I have two questions:
Does anyone know what RPC_S_NOTHING_TO_EXPORT means? The MSDN documentation simply says: "No interfaces have been exported." ... Huh? The session was working fine for numerous instances of the same call up until this point...
Does anyone have any ideas as to how to identify the real problem? Note: Capturing network traffic is something we would rather avoid, if possible, as the problem is sporadic enough that we would likely go through multiple gigabytes of traffic before running into an occurrence.
Capturing network traffic would be one of the best ways to tackle this issue. If you can't do that, could you dump the client process and debug with WinDBG or Visual Studio? Perhaps compare a dump when operating normally versus in the error state?