Hello all. I hope someone will have some advice on this one... We are running Optigold 3.3.4 on win2k server, sp4, all windows updates current, 1G RAM. Also, Filemaker Server 5. Filemaker Pro 5 on all desktops, ranging from windows 98 to XP. Recently we've been having an increasing problem with creating invoices for customers. Clicking the "New Invoice" button hangs Filemaker. The popup asking if you want to include the billing cycle item comes up okay, then proceeding on, the Invoice page starts to come up, but is whited out. It stays that way for several minutes. I don't generate the invoices, but the person here that does assures me it's only started happening in the last week or so and never so bad as it is today. Today we did our batch generation of monthly invoices, approximately 2400 invoices. The creation and printing took hours longer than usual. And since then, individual creation of invoices are hanging 15-20 minutes before someone gives up and kills the process. At this point the Filemakerpro.exe process on the desktop is at 99-100% CPU usage. Looking on the server when this is happening isn't telling me anything...I'm not sure where to look. Killing the process results in the generation of an invoice on the open account with a seemingly random billing item. The only change done to the server in the last 2 weeks was a windows update and the installation of a new key file. I'd roll back to the old key file, but, we've already used some of the licenses from it & I wasn't sure what that would do to our new users if I put back the old key. A reboot of the server didn't fix anything. Let me know if there's more I can tell you to help solve this one.
Yes. We have 8 desktops that access OG. I've tried on 5 with the same result. I've not tried moving everything to a different server, but I'm not seeing any issue on the server.
Today we are trying to generate a small batch of invoices - 38 - and the desktop is hanging. This was only attempted on the one machine. Since the result of stopping the hanging process is the creation of random invoices...I'm a little leery of trying that one on too many machines. I'm going to look today for updates to filemaker 5...
After you stop the process, if you go to the most recent invoice in your system (use the Search button on any customer's Invoices screen, and leave all criteria blank). Then go to the last invoice, and click on it to pull up that customer record. If you look at that invoice detail, is there anything strange with it that you can notice? Does it also happen if you create a single invoice manually? If you go to Maintenance & Preferences -> Clean Up -> Validate Record ID Sequences, does that come up with anything?
Thanks for the help, Shawn. Ok, I went to the validate record id sequences. it comes up with: "Next Record ID Sequence out of order for Invoices. Would you like to fix?" & same for payments. I clicked no on both for now. Quite frankly I'm not usually the one administering Optigold and the usual people are MIA...so, I didn't want to hit "yes" without knowing it's not going to cause catastrophic issues. I tried to create a single invoice manually (with the same 100% usage), stopped the process, restarted the program, looked at the last invoice created. I compared it to the other open invoice for that customer. Differences: "Invoice Date", "Number", "Sent Out on" (blank), "Due Date" (blank), "Time Credit". All these difference seem okay to me, the invoice looks legitimate. The only odd thing about the invoice that was created, the line item used is just a random item. The customer in question is set to DSL - 1 month billing. The item chosen (I did not choose to include the billing cycle item on the invoice at the initial prompt) was a 3 month dialup service item. The "Time Credit" is set to "3m, 0d, 0h", appropriate for the line item choosen.
I choose to fix the record ID sequence for Invoices, the payment message didn't come up again. Fixing the ID sequence, I was able to go back to account "A" and create one invoice. When I tried to do a second invoice, it went back to 100% usage and I had to kill it again. I ran the fix ID sequence again, I have been able to create several on the same account "A" without error. I then tried on another account "B"...*sigh*...same 100% usage hangup back again...killed, restarted, tried account "A" again, same issue.
Ah...perhaps narrowed the sequence of events. Ran the record ID sequence. Created 2 invoices on account "A". Created invoice on account "B". Marked 1 invoice on account "A" for deletion. Attempt to create new invoice on account "A" resulted in hangup.
Ok, attempted again, Restarted OG. went to account "A", marked all test invoices for deletion went to maintenance and deleted all those test invoices went back to account "A", created 2 test invoices. marked the first test invoice for deletion. attempt to create new invoice on account "A" resulted in hangup. Confirmed same sequence 3 times. Seems to be the snag, but, why? this is without even going to resequence the invoice IDs.
You might want to do an upgrade (since it extracts your data out and puts it into a known good set of files), then try it... that would narrow out the possibility of something corrupted in your setup.
mmm, we had just done an upgrade within the last 6 months, I'll have to see if we can try that. I'm more of a mysql person and don't know much about filemaker. Is it worth me finding out how to do table analysis...could a corrupt table be causing such issues?