Faster startup of Next®

More and more customers are using Next® for mission critical applications, and looking to provide 24/7 services. In this setting, the time needed to restart Next® becomes critical.

In the long term, we are working with architectural changes that will lead to zero-down time. For now, our design criteria is that following a normal shut down, you should be able to get Next® up and running in no more than 15 minutes. 

We have experienced that sometime the procedures used to shut down Next® do not allow enough time for Next® to complete normally. As a result, these users experience prolonged start ups, where Next® spends time on unnecessary index synchronization. 

For this reason we have changed our best practice for setting up Windows servers running Next®

  

For the techies

If a Windows service isn’t stopped within 5-20 seconds the service will be terminated by the operating system. This abrupt shutdown causes Next® to synchronize during startup since memory mapped files hasn’t been written to disk. This relates especially to large installations or systems very active prior to shutdown.

To avoid this, two registry keys needs to be changed on the system in order to set how long time the operating system will wait before killing an application. The setting is a maximum limit and as such does not reflect the actual time taken for an application shutdown to complete.

These changes will ensure that Next® has enough time to properly flush all indexes to disk.


Manual Service Stop

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control

Add a new key of type String (if it is not there already) with name WaitToKillServiceTimeout

Alter the value of the key to 600000 (10 minutes, specified in milliseconds)


Automatic Service Stop

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control

Add a new key of type DWORD (if it is not there already) with name ServicesPipeTimeout

Alter the value of the key to 600000 (10 minutes, specified in milliseconds)


Additional information

For additional information on setting op servers for Next®, please refer to the online documentation

This resolves the issue reported as #NEXT-2776.

Commercial terms and conditions

The new best practise is available at no additional cost, to users with an active service plan. Any consultancy assistance will be invoiced.

Disclaimer

Despite our best efforts, we may be forced to change both content and expected delivery of future product updates without notice.

Details

Title:

Faster startup of Next®

Type:

New best practise

Status:

Released

Release time:

February 2020

Affected products:

Next® Approve
Next® Contracts
Next® Enterprise Archive
Next® ExCustody
Next® Invoices
Next® Mailroom
Next® Processes

Audience:

Consultant
Architect
Operations 

Classification:

Public

Responsible product manager:

Kim Hellum

Updated:

25.02.2020

By:

Kim Hellum