win2003/psql20001 sp3/engine crashing

[MacolaHelp]

We recently installed a new 2003 server for our macola app, starship shipping system & 2 custom programs that link goldmine to macola & a web based order tracker to macola & starship. All ran fine for 6 weeks. Over the weekend, a new client workstation was added to the network w/pervasive & macola, minor updates were performed to files that our 3rd party vb app doesn't read. When this 3rd party app started up Monday AM, the pervasive service locked up & knocked all my users out of their 3 other pervasive apps. Also, the btrieve maintenance utility could not be run from the server or a workstation, returning error 3014. We tried a number of scenarios & the 3rd party app continued to throw out all my other pervasive users. We, could, though, stop & restart pervasive services even though we couldn't get at the monitor to delete the offending user.

No program changes were made to any of the apps since early January. We were down all day yesterday & ruled out a number of causes, finally settling on possible bad data. We exported the btrieve files the 3rd party app reads to comma delimited text & imported back in (since btrieve maintenance wouldn't work). This morning, several of our records were missing information in the quantity fields. I removed & reinstalled pvsw & everything seems to be running now.

Question: have you ever seen a choked app corrupt the pervasive services? This app was choking on one particular macola file. After the reinstall of pervasive, I was able to butil save/load the file. At 26,210 records, butil hung for a bit at 99%, then finally recovered the last 7 records. After the butil, I restarted the app that was choking & it & all other apps seem to be running fine now. If the app choked on bad data & stalled its update process to its own database, could that damage the pervasive services to the point that we got error 3014 on butil on the server itself? This app is launched from a win2k client machine.

 

[TomKane]

I've never heard of that exactly but I have heard these situations causing problems:

Inappropriate version of Btrieve/Pervasive for the platform - is the 3rd party app designed to run on the same version of Btrieve/Pervasive as your app is?

Btrieve client/server conflicting with Btrieve workstation edition - does your app and the 3rd party app both use the same Btrieve/Pervasive engine client/server?

WBTRV problem causing read only to be mistaked for open exclusive (P.SQL7) - unlikely that this is the problem

Pervasive don't support requesters that are not the same version as the server - there could be problems there - particularly if you had to apply minor updates/patches for the 3rd party app

 

[TomKane]

It might also be worth your while checking the Pervasive site to see if there are any patches that you can apply to Pervasive - bit of a long shot maybe....

 

[MacolaHelp]

More info: once the app crashes, it breaks pervasive to the point that only a re-install of pvsw will fix it. When the app crashes, here's what happens: app reads macola & starship data through odbc connection to the server. App writes info to a table that has been added to the starship ddf. As I watch the app open in pvsw monitor, initial CPU usage jumps to 30%, then hovers between 25 & 50%, then suddenly spikes to 80+%. After the spike, the microkernel engine shuts down, but services are still running. After services are stopped & started, pvsw behaves as expected. No amount of file manipulation will correct the situation. We are looking at about 12 files, max record count is 30k in any file, physical size under 100meg. Server is 2.8 zeon processor, 1 gig ram. I bumped up pervasive settings as much as I could, increased page file to 4 gig. I've tried w/file version set to both 6 & 7, though macola wants v6. I reinstalled pvsw again yesterday & the app is running fine again using v6 file format. I have only sp3 on this box & am planning to do sp4 & hot fixes next time I am out. What could possibly be happening that would kill pvsw this badly?

 

[MacolaHelp]

Another update: I installed sp4 w/all hot fixes. It seemed like everything worked fine, but discovered that my 3rd party app that writes info from Goldmine to 2 macola data files was inserting corrupted records. It relates to how pervasive handles null values since we service packed from 3 to 4. I found no good documentation on this in the service packs. Does anyone know where I can find docs or resources on this? I have 2 other sites using VB apps on sp4 & we are having performance issues at one & need to find out if we may have a related problem with our code. Also, do pervasive 8 & 8.5 handle the null values on record inserts as we now discovered sp4 in 2000i does. Thanks in advance for your words of wisdom.