Firefox hanging? Kill It

Don't you wish nsd -kill existed for other programs? Well it does.

Sure you can kill processes but for some reason Firefox seems to leave threads hidden or just doesn't end properly sometime(I run FF 3.5.3 right now).

Thanks to a Twitter follower, Dims an IBMer who pointed me to this tool set from Microsoft.

PSkill is just one tool in the download. And it works remotely as well!

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb896683.aspx

PsKill v1.12 By Mark Russinovich
Published: December 4, 2006

Windows NT/2000 does not come with a command-line 'kill' utility. You can get one in the Windows NT or Win2K Resource Kit, but the kit's utility can only terminate processes on the local computer. PsKill is a kill utility that not only does what the Resource Kit's version does, but can also kill processes on remote systems. You don't even have to install a client on the target computer to use PsKill to terminate a remote process.

Installation
Just copy PsKill onto your executable path, and type pskill with command-line options defined below.

Using PsKill
Running PsKill with a process ID directs it to kill the process of that ID on the local computer. If you specify a process name PsKill will kill all processes that have that name.

Usage: pskill [- ] [-t] [\\computer [-u username] [-p password]]
- Displays the supported options.
-t Kill the process and its descendants.
\\computer Specifies the computer on which the process you want to terminate is executing. The remote computer must be accessible via the NT network neighborhood.
-u username If you want to kill a process on a remote system and the account you are executing in does not have administrative privileges on the remote system then you must login as an administrator using this command-line option. If you do not include the password with the -p option then PsKill will prompt you for the password without echoing your input to the display.
-p password This option lets you specify the login password on the command line so that you can use PsList from batch files. If you specify an account name and omit the -p option PsList prompts you interactively for a password.
process id Specifies the process ID of the process you want to kill.
process name Specifies the process name of the process or processes you want to kill.

See twitter is good for something.

SnTT - NIF means NOT INDEXING FULLY

Sometimes I need to be more granular than I am when troubleshooting problems.
I don't like to be because I feel it inhibits my ability to grok the total issue.
But some servers just demand it.

Admittedly NIF stands for Notes Indexing Facility. But my explanation is more accurate when it is not functioning.

So I ran DCT, the excellent Domino Configuration Tuner on the clients Domino Windows server running 703FP1, after temporarily installing the 8.5 client on the server.

It of course told me the basics I know already, mutlithread the full text index, enhance various other notes.ini settings like:
UPDATE_FULLTEXT_THREAD=1
SERVER_NAME_LOOKUP_NO_UPDATE=1
DEBUG_ENABLE_UPDATE_FIX=8191
NSF_BACKUP_MEMORY_CONSTRAINED=1
SF_BACKUP_MEMORY_LIMIT=104857600

and my personal favorite: view_rebuild_dir=e:\lotustemp\

This last line allows you to specify where the temporary space required for the rebuilds are located. always helpful when one of the hard drives is running low and can lead to other issues.

The bottom line is the problem occurs and it seems to be an agent which is stuck. Thought about and DCT confirmed, web agents were not running concurrently, trying that change too.

Enable agents to run asynchronously through the Server document -> Internet Protocols -> Domino Web Engine tab. Under Web Agents, enable the "Run Web Agents Concurrently" setting.

And found a very corrupted file, which turned out to be some bad restored file anyway.
Cleared it all and what happened? dead server in 2 days instead of 1. Improvement yes, fixed, no.

Called IBM Support, I had done more than my usual efforts and was tired of trying.

They suggested using the line, ftg_use_sys_memory=1, which came out in 5.0.9, link to the technote.

This will instruct the full-text (FT) engine to use direct malloc calls from the operating system for large allocations, instead of requesting memory through the Notes Memory Manager.

And we wait to see if this indeed fixed it as IBM suggested. Updated late Wen. night, it did not resolve it, although it hung on longer.

Issue seems to be when users are logging in during the morning, I wonder about peaking or utilization.