on 05-05-2016 10:22 PM
Powerbuilder Classic 12.5.2
We have user reporting Fatal Disk Errors from our Powerbuilder application more often than I'd like. Does any one have any ideas what causes these? I'd like to try and reduce them but I'm not sure where to start looking.
Thanks for any help
Hi Aaron;
I've never seen any PB application get disk errors - ever unless ... the hard drive / disk controller was actually failing.
We have PB applications at work curreny that run 24/7 doing disk intensive operations on millions of images per day for weeks & months on end with never a disk error.
It sounds like it's just one client (PC) - is that correct?
Regards ... Chris
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Thanks Chris. We have a Citrix server farm, and it's happening to users on that, and I'm assuming it's on more than one machine, but I hope to find out more details today. We have seen this error in development when we do a release. If someone has left the application open and therefore a file locked, we kill off that open file lock and then copy the release over the top and then they will get a Fatal Disk Error the next time they run the application. Bit I don't think that should be happening on the Citrix server.
Hi Aron;
We have lots of applications that run from a File server that also have the file locking issue on a DLL or the EXE. We have to kill off the file lock sessions in order to refresh the folder with a new application deployment. All our file server environments though are pure MS-Windows and not Citirix. Also, after refreshing the application files, there are no crashes from the application users on 1st time use.
I think your issue might well be Citrix. Even a network drive failure on our applications does not render a "Fatal Disk Errors" message of any kind. So I would definitely treat this issue as a Citrix related problem (for the time being) as being the likely cause.
Good luck .. I hope you get to the root of this problem soon!
Regards ... Chris
Interesting out testers are just using a network location of a Windows file server too, and we get a Fatal Disk Error pretty much every time we have to close some locked files. We do have an extensively used .NET COM dll, I wonder if it's that. It would be nice if Powerbuilder told me what it was trying to do when it got a Fatal Disk Error.
What I did for this situation is to have the Citrix shortcut point to a .bat file instead of the .exe file. I have two folders containing the executable files, one called Version1 and one called Version2. The .bat file executes one of the versions. To deploy a new version, I copy the files into the Version# folder currently not in use and then change the .bat file. The users currently running the app will pick up the new version the next time they start it. If the change is urgent, I then would send out an email requesting they exit and go back in.
You can tell your testers to use Sysinternals Process Monitor and monitor your EXE.
This helps to locate the error.
hth
Arnd
Thanks for all the help. It looks to me like moving my application from a network drive to a local drive on the Citrix server is likely to solve this problem. Does anyone know if that also applies to the PBDK common files?
Thanks!
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I used to see that all the time. We were running the app off a network drive that was on a server that was having reliability issues. It happened whenever the app tried to load an object from a PBD and the PBD file couldn't be read because the users connection went down for a few seconds.
I moved the app executable to a different server and the problem went away.
The system admin in charge of the server should take a look at it.
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Aron,
I did away with running applications from the server a long time ago and instead developed an auto install routine that runs every time there is a new release available. Aside from getting rid of the kind of errors that you mention the applications ran a lot much faster locally than from the server. This was a long time ago and maybe with today's hardware it won't make much of a difference now but I kept the local run strategy anyway. Just not sure how this can be done using Citrix.
Ricardo
Hi,
This has happened to us when someone was deploying the app in the same folder the user was trying to use it.
Bad idea... When we found out, we've Split our environment in two diferente places, things got back to normal.
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I've seen that happening when an over aggressive virus scanner was blocking access to the file.
Are your PowerBuilder applications accessed through Citrix? I've also seen that error when Citrix servers are running out of session memory.
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Could be the app is trying to set directory to somewhere with lack of permissions or WiFi vs cable switch making network drives unavailable temporarily but fatally. Ask user what they were doing perhaps.
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