WebDNA failuresNearly half of all WebCatalog plugin users have reported to have seen catastrophic failures in the WebDNA engine.For some web publishers, it's gone to the point where they need to restart their web servers several times a day. Historically, Smith Micro hasn't taken care of this very significant issue and now that the WebDNA technology has been purchased by
WSC, the affected web publishers are looking for the new owner to fix things up.
That's why Christophe Billiottet, the new co-owner of WebDNA, with Donovan Brooke, chose to address this issue, in an email...
- Concerning this problem, we think it is not in WebDNA code itself, otherwise it would have behaved like this since the beginning. Also, only some customers got this problem.
Running servers of all sorts from years, i can think of many reasons why a server will start crashing, or even why just some applications will start crashing regularely: hardware reasons (dead fan, bad capacitor, disk problem) or software reasons. A simple backup could overheat a CPU with a bad fan and kill part of the processes (we have had this problem few days ago).
The problem we have here, in my opinion, should be solved by a complete OS reinstall and a WebDNA reinstall.
We talked about this to SMSI, particularely concerning the "phone home" suspicion; Scott told us
- "It has been awhile, and I do not have the code in front of me at the moment. But I do remember taking into consideration the possibility of the license server 'not being there' when the phone-home code is executed. So if the licensing log server is down, it should not have a negative impact on WebDNA engine performance. From memory, I think it was set to phone home every two hours."
We will of course check into this deeply, but i doubt we will find anything that could explain the crashes in WebDNA code.
- chris
