How to stop a service which is in loop or taking long time to execute in IBM BPM

Sometimes on Development or test a service might get stuck in loop or take too much time to execute, If it takes unusual time to execute you need to halt it by force. Follow below steps to halt or force stop a service.

• log on to ProcessAdmin console as admin/tw_admin.
• Go to Monitoring -> Process Monitor
• You'll see a page displaying summary of all the services. On the top of the page, you'll see "Process", "Services".
• Click on Services
• If you service is still running, you'll find it under "Active Services Currently Executing"
• Click on the service and you will be routed to a web page with the serive detials
• You'll also notice a button "halt service". This should stop your service.
• If this does not work, the only option I can think of is to restart Lombardi(IBM BPM app node) unless there is webapi call to teminate tasks (which I am not very sure of).

Disabling the tracking at cluster level when not required

Few days before we were dealing with an interesting problem in which we were getting db lock wait issues on LSW_PERF_DATA_TRANSFER in ProcessDB. While investigating we found that table(in process server DB) was used for tracking purpose and when we asked all development teams they said they are not using tracking at all.

When we check the applications we found out even though project team were saying that they are not using tracking at all, "Enable Tracking" and "Auto Tracking" option were checked in almost all BPDs. There were lots of project executing that it was not possible to make everyone uncheck that options immediately and get new version deployed. As no project wants to use tracking we decided to disable tracking at farm level.

We have disabled it by changing configuration in dmgr and syncing it with all nodes.

Details are there in below link,

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21611013

NOTE :: Do not change "00Static.xml" file. Always change/add configuration details in "100Custom.xml" file

Text format problem in text input box IBM BPM 7.5.1

One of our testing team came back with an issue few weeks before. They were entering some text in first screen and bind it to a variable and use the same variable to populate the next screen. The problem they were facing was all the formatting was removed in next screen. i.e. if they input text with new line(multiple line in text area) in next screen they were seeing everything in one line.

Apparently this is the known issue with 7.5.1 and one fix is available for this.

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg1JR42355 

This is also included in 7.5.1.1 upgrade.

OutOfMemory due to high number of snapshots installed in Process Server

How it started.

one of our Process Server farm was crashing after generating lots of heap dumps. CPU usage was almost 100% continuously and AppTarget Node ran out of heap. This is for 7.5.1.0 version.

Investigation
Using the IBM Heap Analyzer tool, we observed that we had a single instance of  com.lombardisoftware.server.ejb.persistence.versioning.BranchManager worth of 4GB+

After some digging we found below iFix.

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg1JR42522

JR42522: BusinessDataAliasCache performance and memory leak fix for IBM Business Process Manager

Solution::

Upgrade to 7.5.1.1(we took this road) or install iFix provided in above link

Get list of toolkit which is not being used in any Process App

We are using IBM BPM 7.5.1.1 and having lost of Process Apps(100+) and Toolkits(50+)

We need to do housekeeping in order to make our Development environment fast. We need to figure out which all Process Apps or Toolkits are not used and we can safely Archive.

I have created one query which get list of all toolkits which are not used by any process app as dependency.

Below is the query.

select NAME, SHORT_NAME, LSW_PROJECT.LAST_MODIFIED from LSW_PROJECT where IS_TOOLKIT='T' and SHORT_NAME not in (select NAME from LSW_PROJECT_DEPENDENCY group by NAME) order by LSW_PROJECT.LAST_MODIFIED

We distributed the output of above query to all development teams and after their approval(basically if they do not raise any concern in 7 days) we Archive toolkits.