RE: MilMedia issues

["Jeanette Berard" <JBERARD@xxxxxxxxxx>]

One thing that I have noticed with MilMedia crashes is that if you open your Windows Task Manager and keep it up while you process a problem attachment, you can see that at the moment that the hang occurs, the system peaks out on the monitor.  If you look at your Java screen for the event, it usually has one of two messages, a memory error, or a file incompatibility error.  Neither message makes much sense, which makes it hard to diagnose what really happened.

We had about the same number of freezes, but no record locks since we added the last software update and had several system wide freeings of records in use.  Apparently the amount of "junk" generally in the system has an effect on the process.

It does seem to help if the record has had any other changes, to save the record before adding an attachment.  I also wait several second after attaching a file to save the record.  It doesn't always help, but it seems to decrease the number of freezes.  It also seems to help with our image files if they are compressed.  I have had files of all sizes hang the system, but it does happen more often with the larger files.   Still, I think the problem relates to how much memory the process uses, rather than how much memory the attachment uses.

Just my observations; there's probably a lot I don't understand about the problem.
Jeanette

-----Original Message-----
From: innopac-bounces@xxxxxxxxxx 
[mailto:innopac-bounces@xxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Carolyn McDonald
Sent: Thursday, February 26, 2004 6:13 PM
To: 'innopac@xxxxxxxxxx' 
Subject: MilMedia issues

Hi all,

We have been using Millennium Media for some time now for our ereserve
material, both sound and readings, and generally we are very happy with the
functionality.

However we have some serious performance issues. When we are saving the
files to the server (we don't use the module for scanning), quite frequently
the millennium client freezes. The only fix possible is to restart the
client and 'free' the course record. This has been going on for many months,
and is causing us serious problems with workloads given that this is the
busiest time of the year for us.

We have an open call with III, and they have told us that it is a memory
problem on the client. We have extensively tested this, and it just isn't
the case. The freezing happens even when we are saving a URL, which has
almost no size component. And when the freeze happens, there is often lots
of free memory on the machine (we are running Windows XP). But just to be
sure, we doubled the memory to 512. It didn't make any difference. We also
made sure that all other applications were closed down while staff did this
task - that didn't make any difference either. 

The problem is hard to understand as it is intermittent - sometimes it works
fine for many items, and other days it is freezing on almost every one, and
it may take staff 2 or 3 attempts to get a document loaded.

I wanted to send this email as the information on the FAQ is quite
misleading, at least as it applies to the problem at our site. And I always
find it useful to know if others have similar problems to us, so maybe this
might help someone else. I know that another site in Australia have been
told that there is a fix coming in the next release (I'm not sure our staff
will still be sane by then), but we haven't been given this information.

If anyone else has any further information, or even has a fix for this
problem, we would love to hear it.

Carolyn McDonald 
Library IT Co-ordinator
Murdoch University Library
email: C.Mcdonald@xxxxxxxxxx 
phone: 61 8 9360 6273

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Jeanette Berard
Special Collections Librarian
Thousand Oaks Library System
(805) 449-2660 xt228
jberard@xxxxxxxxxx