I configured my domino server to archive the log.nsf every morning at 5:00 AM via compact -A. This worked fine on domino 602cf2. Since I made an update to 6.5.5 the task still starts but nothing is put into the archive log and the compactor task hangs.
The server still says “Database Compactor Archiving documents from log.nsf” and in taskmanager I see the ncompact task consumes about 25% CPU. I did a similar archive job on a other domino 6.5.5 server without problems.
The server has a high load with mailrouting for 3500 Users and therefore a lot of logentries. I also recreated the log.nsf and the a_log.nsf including the archive profile without success.
LOG.nsf is a special system file - do you think it’s wise to try archiving that file? It’s constantly kept open by the server task so running a compact on it is not a great idea, and might not be workable. If you try running a compact on the whole server, most of the system files will cause compact to return errors because those files are never closed. This is why the mail.box files get compacted by the router itself.
My experience is that it’s best to shut down, rename log.nsf to oldlog.nsf and restart. oldlog.nsf is your archive. ND6 logs seem much bigger than ND5. The log= entry in notes.ini is supposed to help you trim down the file if you need to keep it smaller.
Aside from this, compact -a seems to have some undocumented limits, aka bugs.
Of course You are right, but why did it work with the older Domino Version 6.02? Shutting down the server and renameing the log is not an option, this server is handling all the mailtraffic for our domain, that’s the reason why I have to archive the log to keep it.
I have experienced the same in our environment. We have also Domino Server 6.5.5 and we tried to archive documents from a huge database (almost 6o GB) with compact -a. Archiving process started nicely but nothing happened. No error messages in log or anything else. We let the task on about 32 hours and then we had to reboot the server. I was thinking about this failure because of the size or our database but I do not know the thing. After upgrading to 6.5.5 we have also other “mystery” hanging problems. I have been asked other persons experiences but did not get any responses so far.
All our server run 6.5.5. FP2. We have two mail clusters (in failover). Trying to compact the log.nsf on the primary servers via a program document fail, while on the others it works oke.
In the logs I see theat compact starts but nothing more.
On the others I see that it has archived some documents to archive\a_log.nsf and the compact task shuts down normally
I’ve run into this just this weekend. Implemented a retention policy and ran compact -a against the mail directory. Everything was fine until it hit the C’s, then Domino just shut down cleanly. No, NSD, no crash, nothing in the event log in the OS. This happened on 3 different servers in the exact same manner. I tried it three times each on the three servers with the same response, just a clean shutdown of Domino. If it was just one server i could expect a corrupt mail file or view or document, but not on three different servers.
If I had an NSD I could at least parse that, but I have absolutely nothing in the Domino logs or the OS logs to tell me why this is happening.