vault usage problems

[nmcalpin]

I have received the following communication from my developers, who are using Vault pretty frequently. Can you suggest how I might resolve these issues?

* It frequently disconnects. You think it's connected because you can see the files. You select to do an operation. And then it tells you you're not connected. You then have to reconnect and find your files again.

* Check ins are not registered. We can check in files and Vault says they are still checked out. You have to do all kinds of strange things to get it to do what you want, like undoing checkout and a series of ill-defined trickery.

* Sometimes checkins don't work at all. It sometimes doesn't do checkins at all until you open and close the options dialogue.

* I suspect that it screws around with your files in unpredicatable ways. The other day I had my options set to not make files writable. I also made sure that I had _un_checked the option for "automatic refresh." Still, BCB kept doing complete recompiles even when I hadn't touched major probject files that should require that. When I set my options to make files read only this behavior stopped. I suspect that whatever that "automatic refresh" thing does is changing the dates on files even when you haven't selected that option.

I am running Vault on a dual processor xeon server with 2gb ram, SQL Server 2000, W2K server, Vault 2.0.6. This server is also running SOS. We never have disconnect issues with SOS.

[dan]

* It frequently disconnects. You think it's connected because you can see the files. You select to do an operation. And then it tells you you're not connected. You then have to reconnect and find your files again.

We use IIS as our server, and usually timeouts are due to either an IIS setting, or some piece of the network that is set to timeout connections. Do you have a proxy, firewall, or anything else between you and IIS that would cause connections to drop?

Also, are you using IIS 5 or IIS 6? Normally Win2K uses IIS 5, but you may have installed IIS 6 separetely. IIS 6 is very agressive about timing out connections, and you would have to play with the connection settings to allow for longer sessions.

How long does it go before it times out a session? You might try setting the server log to "debug" mode and monitoring what is happening in the Vault server when the timeouts happen. Are they are happening to everyone at once or are they individual to each developer?

* Check ins are not registered. We can check in files and Vault says they are still checked out. You have to do all kinds of strange things to get it to do what you want, like undoing checkout and a series of ill-defined trickery.

* Sometimes checkins don't work at all. It sometimes doesn't do checkins at all until you open and close the options dialogue.

Are your developers primarily using the GUI client or the IDE client? If it is the GUI client, turn on client logging and then send us the log when this happens. If it is the IDE client, there are a number of settings that might affect how checkouts work.

* I suspect that it screws around with your files in unpredicatable ways. The other day I had my options set to not make files writable. I also made sure that I had _un_checked the option for "automatic refresh." Still, BCB kept doing complete recompiles even when I hadn't touched major probject files that should require that. When I set my options to make files read only this behavior stopped. I suspect that whatever that "automatic refresh" thing does is changing the dates on files even when you haven't selected that option.

Automatic refresh does not retrieve any files to your local system - it updates the status of your file and folder list in the Vault tree. I'm not sure if Get Latest update the read-write flag if the file has not changed. In any case, this behavior would make sense if you did a Get Latest and some of the underlying files have changed.

[nmcalpin]

We use IIS as our server, and usually timeouts are due to either an IIS setting, or some piece of the network that is set to timeout connections. Do you have a proxy, firewall, or anything else between you and IIS that would cause connections to drop?

Also, are you using IIS 5 or IIS 6? Normally Win2K uses IIS 5, but you may have installed IIS 6 separetely. IIS 6 is very agressive about timing out connections, and you would have to play with the connection settings to allow for longer sessions.

How long does it go before it times out a session? You might try setting the server log to "debug" mode and monitoring what is happening in the Vault server when the timeouts happen. Are they are happening to everyone at once or are they individual to each developer?

I don't have the metrics for "how long". We are using IIS5. I looked at the IIS settings, and it was configured for 900 second timeouts (15 minutes). I would like to increase this to at least 28,800 (8 hours). Is there any other IIS settings which would control this? That is to say - is there any other places I need to make a change, or only the "connection timeout" value in the web site properties.

Are your developers primarily using the GUI client or the IDE client? If it is the GUI client, turn on client logging and then send us the log when this happens. If it is the IDE client, there are a number of settings that might affect how checkouts work.

The vault GUI. I will see about the logs.

Automatic refresh does not retrieve any files to your local system - it updates the status of your file and folder list in the Vault tree. I'm not sure if Get Latest update the read-write flag if the file has not changed. In any case, this behavior would make sense if you did a Get Latest and some of the underlying files have changed.

Can you elaborate about the GLV behavior differences between when vault marks files read-only, and when it does not? My developer said he uses GLV all the time. any additional information you can provide would be great.

[dan]

I don't have the metrics for "how long". We are using IIS5. I looked at the IIS settings, and it was configured for 900 second timeouts (15 minutes). I would like to increase this to at least 28,800 (8 hours). Is there any other IIS settings which would control this? That is to say - is there any other places I need to make a change, or only the "connection timeout" value in the web site properties.

There is a setting in the Vault Admin Tool (Server Options tab) that also detemines connection timeouts, which is set to 3 days by default.

The vault GUI. I will see about the logs.

OK - good. We have had a few other reports of checkins succeeding, but the checkout list not being updated until the Vault client is restarted. We very much want to find and fix this issue, but have never been able to reproduce it in house, despite a lot of effort. Getting log output would be great if you can reproduce this.

Can you elaborate about the GLV behavior differences between when vault marks files read-only, and when it does not? My developer said he uses GLV all the time. any additional information you can provide would be great.

There is an option in the Get Latest dialog called Get Writable that controls this. The default in the dialog is determined by Tools->Options->Local Files->Make Writable.

I just checked, and doing a Get Latest does indeed change the read-write flag on files during a GLV, regardless of whether they have been modified on the server. So, if you do a GLV on a folder and Make Writable is set to Make all Files Writable, then all files in that working folder that exist in Vault would be marked read-write.