Unstopable dowalk

weixel · Post by **weixel** » Mon Nov 05, 2007 5:34 pm

I have a process that reports that it finished in 4 minutes, yet it never seems to have updated the index and by all appearances it is still conducting its walk.

I'm running Webinator 5.0.5 on Solaris. Checking monitor.log shows a Database Monitor starting on the runaway profile almost immediately after it lists it stopping.

I tried manually issuing a texis command to the stop script, but to no avail.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,

Mark

Post by **mark** » Mon Nov 05, 2007 5:48 pm

The process you're seeing may be the monitor. If it's a database monitor it will go away after a few minutes of activity on the database. If it's the overall monitor it will run indefinitely. Neither monitor will do any walking.

Perhaps that 4 minutes was the previous walk?
Does the walk status have "pause" and "stop" buttons at the top? If so, then it's still running and hitting either of those should stop it. If not, the walk is not running. Do you have a schedule set such that it would restart itself shortly after finishing?

"monitor -k" will kill monitors, though you shouldn't generally need to do that. What texis command did you try to stop it?

weixel · Post by **weixel** » Mon Nov 05, 2007 7:06 pm

Hi, Mark:

The walk status page does indeed have pause and stop buttons at the top. Clicking them triggers the appropriate command to texis, but neither seems to work: if I go to the walk status after clicking stop, the refresh countdown continues to churn and the page keeps reloading. Similarly, if I go to the walk settings, the form buttons are Update and Update & Stop, not Go.

I tried "monitor -k" and still no change in behavior.

I'll do a texis -LS to doublecheck the schedule to see if something's wonky there. The profile is set to do a refresh walk every Tuesday evening, but that's it.

-- Mark

Post by **mark** » Tue Nov 06, 2007 10:26 am

You may need newer scripts to ensure the kill of a stuck or slow background crawler process. Or you can kill "texis" by hand from the shell using the system's "kill" command.

weixel · Post by **weixel** » Tue Nov 06, 2007 10:28 am

Hi, Mark:

Newer scripts? From where are these available?

Thanks,

Mark

weixel · Post by **weixel** » Tue Nov 06, 2007 11:25 am

Well, killing texis didn't seem to do anything. Going to the walk status for the profile in question afterward still showed the Pause and Stop buttons.

Any other ideas?

Post by **mark** » Tue Nov 06, 2007 12:04 pm

Scripts are in the Webinator support area. Products->More about Webinator->Scripts or www.webinator.com->Scripts.

So there's no "texis" processes running at all but it still says running? Some other process must have reused it's process id. See what process it thinks is the walker with:
texis -d INSTALLDIR/texis/testdb "select Name,String from options where Profile='YOUR_PROFILE_NAME' and Name='SSc_walking'"
Clean that entry out with:
texis -d INSTALLDIR/texis/testdb "delete from options where Profile='YOUR_PROFILE_NAME' and Name='SSc_walking'"

weixel · Post by **weixel** » Tue Nov 06, 2007 1:09 pm

Interesting: issuing the first query results in nothing. If I run the query without the "and Name='SSc_walking'" parameter, but pipe the results through to grep SSc_walking, I get a result of SSc_walking, followed by what I assume is a process number. If I look through the entire result set, I can find the SSc_walking entry before what looks like the header to the PDF file that was being indexed.

Also interesting: the result set of the query that does not try to match on Name shows a ton of entries that begin with SSc_pause_ . Is that a clue to the hangup?

If I can't issue a query that selects "SSc_walking", am I going to be able to delete an entry that includes it?

Post by **mark** » Tue Nov 06, 2007 1:55 pm

If you can't select it you won't be able to delete it. Maybe you had a typo in your SQL?

weixel · Post by **weixel** » Tue Nov 06, 2007 3:11 pm

At first I thought that was the case, but it's not. "select Name,String from options where Profile='profilename' and Name='SSc_walking'" returns nothing; "select Name,String from options where Profile='profilename' and Name='SSc_url'", however, does return the appropriate values.

In my less-than-scientific tests, all of the values for the Name column, except for SSc_walking and SSc_walkdb, are returning results. Queries that specify SSc_walking or SSc_walkdb return nothing. In fact, the only effect of issuing the command is that I get the texis version info.