Xense Profiler v1.3 beta

December 19, 2007 at 8:52 pm | Posted in Performance, Xense Profiler | Leave a comment

Xense Profiler v1.3 beta is now on the Xense website for download by existing customers. Prospective customers can purchase Xense Profiler from the Xense website or via our reseller Dell ASAP.

There are a number of changes in 1.3 but the key ones are:

  • A new Top Queries section on the summary report. This lists the 10 ten longest running queries (using the true query duration).
  • Performance improvements especially for parsing dmcl 5.3 traces

The Top Queries report is a great addition to the summary report. The Query Summary is excellent for getting an understanding of all the queries being issued by a Documentum application; it allows you to spot patterns in the queries being run. However when your application is suffering from 1 or 2 slow-running queries the Top Queries report allows you to quickly home in on the culprit.

The performance improvements are much needed when processing 5.3 traces. If you examine 5.3 dmcl trace files you will find there is a lot of extra debug type information whenever a collection object is transferred from the Content Server to the client. A bug in Xense Profiler v1.2 caused excessive CPU usage whenever the new 5.3 trace lines were being processed.

Bad Citizens of the (Documentum) World

December 14, 2007 at 4:31 pm | Posted in Troubleshooting | 4 Comments

One of the enduring problems with some Documentum application installers is that they can be very inconsiderate to other Documentum programs. Ever tried to install Content Server, Web Publisher and Documentum Application Builder on the same machine? Usually at least one app doesn’t work. This is a very typical scenario for a developer or consultant and is also a typical architecture for a small production Documentum installation. The ‘solution’ is to reinstall the app that isn’t working, but usually one of the other apps stop working (some solution).

The problem seems to be the way each application amends dctm.jar. dctm.jar contains a single manifest file that contains a list of other Documentum jar files that are needed by Documentum applications. Simply including dctm.jar on the class path serves to include all the jar files listed in the manifest. When the application installer for a product updates the dctm.jar manifest file to add it’s own application specific jar files the effect is often to remove the application specific files for another application. So you install DAB and Web Publisher stop working. You reinstall WebPublisher and DAB stops working.

Now one way to deal with this is to simply edit the manifest file to include the missing files. But I must admit I have found the manifest file to be very picky about how I update the file and in frustration I came up with another way that works well for DAB:

  • First install DAB and make a copy of dctm.jar, call it dctm2.jar
  • Now install the other applications
  • Create a batch file containing 1) a new class path definition to override the System classpath 2) Command line invocation of DAB

Here’s the contents of the batch file I use to start DAB (I locate it in C:\Program Files\Documentum\Application Builder):

set ClassPath=C:\Program Files\Documentum\dctm2.jar;C:\Documentum\config
bin\Dab.exe

Similarly Documentum Application Installer can be started using the following batch file located in C:\Program Files\Documentum\Application Installer:

set ClassPath=C:\Program Files\Documentum\dctm2.jar;C:\Documentum\config
"Application Installer.exe"

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