How to track time consuming activity on Vault Server?

Tri · Post by **Tri** » Thu Feb 23, 2006 10:09 am

Vault Server 3.16

When the Vault Server is suddenly slow. I would like to know if it is a network issue or a time consuming process is running at the server.

What do you recommend to monitor the Vault server activity?

Thanks in advance.

ian_sg · Post by **ian_sg** » Thu Feb 23, 2006 10:43 am

Depending on what you've got running on the Vault server, I'd use some combination of Windows Performance Monitor and SQL Profiler. Note that SQL Profiler does add some overhead, so I'd only run that if absolutely necessary. If nothing but Vault is running on the machine, simply tracking CPU usage by SQL Server and IIS processes using Windows perfmon would meet your needs.

Update: both perfmon and profiler will add "some overhead", but it's easy to add a LOT of overhead with profiler. So use it with caution, meaning monitor only what's absolutely necessary.

Tri · Post by **Tri** » Thu Feb 23, 2006 10:51 am

Could Vault Server log be used to hint more individual details?

For example, if I know UserX is commiting a huge changeset. This could help to arrange to do the task off peak hour.

If I suspect that the network is slow, and I see that CPU usage is slow on the Vault Server (the Win2003 server is exclusively dedicated to Vault). Is it safe to conclude that the slowness is "probably" a network problem?

ian_sg · Post by **ian_sg** » Thu Feb 23, 2006 10:55 am

That's what I was thinking: if there's no sustained CPU or I/O spike at a known slow period, the network is the next place to look.

You could also put the vault server log in debug mode, to get more information about what it's doing during slow periods.

Tri · Post by **Tri** » Thu Feb 23, 2006 11:14 am

Our Vault Server log level is set to "Quiet Mode", today, most entries show users log in/out. Not much of info.

Is it doable to improve Vault Server to allow to change the logging level on the fly (without restarting IIS)?

ian_sg · Post by **ian_sg** » Thu Feb 23, 2006 11:19 am

You can actually restart just the Vault web service by saving its web.config file, which will make your log setting change take effect. By default this is located at c:\InetPub\wwwroot\VaultService\web.config.

Tri · Post by **Tri** » Thu Feb 23, 2006 11:56 am

If there were pending transactions at the time I save the web.config (some users were in the middle of get latest or committing changes). What would happen to these transactions?

ian_sg · Post by **ian_sg** » Thu Feb 23, 2006 12:06 pm

IIS shuts things down gracefully. Pending transactions would be fine.