In support of a (rather old unresolved) PMR, I installed R8.5.1, then upgraded to R8.5.1FP1 (since there doesn’t seem to be a direct FP1 installer). This was on a clean XP Pro virtual machine, with a clean install of Domino and upgrade. There are printer drivers and such on this virtual machine but no other software has ever been on it. It’s nearly as pristine as one can get.
Since I went through all that trouble for the PMR, I thought I should leverage it for development, and use this VM’s server as my development server (which is on separate physical hardware as well), rather than do development on a server that’s running on the same box as as the DDE VM runs on.
I got it all set up, and all was good, but I was missing my console for debug output. I have an R8.5FP1 client so I loaded Admin for that and connected to the R8.5.1FP1 server with a live console. Then I started running through XPage web pages to make sure the live console was getting what it should. That’s when nhttp crashed.
The ugly part of this whole deal is the NDS says:
WARNING(0)
Instruction pointer is invalid, will attempt to extract first address from stack context.
Then there is some thread data, one of which says FATAL, and it’s nhttp.
Then it says:
Detected truncated call stack (small number of frames)
Invalid IP and truncated stack are pretty serious for a VM that’s got 330MB of free RAM at crash time, by the NSD file.
I’ve gone back to the old way … running the server on the same box as the DDE VM, since that’s what’s always worked in the past.
I’ve been using VirtualBox for about five months now, through a handful of updates. It’s amazingly stable and fast. I can’t tell a performance difference between R8.5.x clients in VirtualBox vs clients on the host.
I’ve been fiddling with this VM server since I made the post, and it appears to regularly simply stop working. If I wait a bit it will “come back” again. It’s possible Linux, the host on that box, is sleeping that process or something. I haven’t really done any troubleshooting.
It’s also quite slow to load pages in DDE, like 12 seconds, where the Domino server running on the same hardware as the client VM loads a page four seconds. This is not network congestion, though that doesn’t mean it’s not network related.
I think at this point I should do some packet capture on each end, and processing monitoring on the other box, to see if there isn’t something out of whack. I just built that Linux box and it’s possible I missed a tweak somewhere.
The VM server hasn’t crashed, however, since that first time. I seem to recall the server I normally use (on this box) did the same thing, and there is post by me in early December with the same crash and same reason … truncated stack frame. I wonder if the first time I run a Domino server if it doesn’t have to do this, and once its out of its system it won’t do it again? (chuckle)
“- I’ve been fiddling with this VM server since I made the post, and it appears to regularly simply stop working. If I wait a bit it will “come back” again. It’s possible Linux, the host on that box, is sleeping that process or something. I haven’t really done any troubleshooting.”
Well, THAT is interesting. This is the first I’ve found of anyone else having the same problem I’m seeing on TWO Domino machines I’ve tried running under VirtualBox. They would regularly just go away for a minute or two. My own server has been running just fine under VirtualBox for a year now, as have several others I know about. I have been unable to figure out what is going on there.
I run R6.5.4 server on another VBox VM and it’s flawless. This is the only server that has issues. You mention your server running for “over a year” … does that mean it’s an older version as well? This is of course grabbing at straws, but there it is.
If you are running 8.5.1, was it a clean install or an upgrade? Perhaps that’s the difference.
Anyone else see this “temporary hang” thing happen?..
Hmm, right - mine is an upgrade from before 8.x. The other two were fresh installs. I also had a fresh 8.5.1 beta server running under VirtualBox but it was only for the Traveler beta so I really never hit it with a client. Windows Servers also running in VirtualBox on the same hosts sometimes “went away” as well with the two clients I mentioned. The problem is there are too many moving parts - different motherboards, memory, versions of VirtualBox, versions of hosts (Ubuntu), etc etc. I finally had to punt and do away with the virtual servers and just run straight native Windows servers running Domino, which has been much more stable. These were very small companies too, not possibly stressing the machines - 16 people on one and 5 on the other. I would love to know where things went wrong, although my own server seems to be running just fine virtually.