How to get acrobat process count in the server machine

[PALAKSHA Hurkadli]

           We are the third party plug-in developers of Adobe Acrobat, and we have a product of plug-in applications,

and many of our customers using this product for many years.

            In order to evalutate the license of the product in Server machines(from where many client machines accessing this product), we use the logic of counting the number of acrobat processes running on the machine,  using the below code snippet

string MainFileName = System.Diagnostics.Process.GetCurrentProcess().MainModule.FileName;

System.Diagnostics.Process.GetProcessesByName(System.IO.Path.GetFileNameWithoutExtension(MainFileName)).Length;

From this we were getting number of Acrobat processes running the server and evaluting the same with license purchased, and

when all the licenses are in use, we display the message and opening the acrobat without loading our product.

this was working fine for many years.  But recently one of our customer (where they are on  Windows server 2019 datacenter), which purchased 6 liceneses, but when only 3-4 users open the acrobat,

it is saying all the 6 liceneses are in use and open the acrobat without our product.    Why our product failing to get the correct count of acrobat processes?  what causing to behave incorrectly,  can anyone help me on this?

[TeMatcha]

Here are a few potential reasons and steps to troubleshoot the problem:

Potential Causes and Solutions

1. User Session Isolation: Windows Server environments, especially versions like Windows Server 2019, can run multiple user sessions. Each user session might have its own instance of Acrobat, but these might be isolated in a way that your current method isn't accounting for correctly.

2. Permission Issues: The process of enumerating all instances of Acrobat might be failing due to insufficient permissions. Ensure that the process running your code has the necessary permissions to access all user sessions and enumerate all processes.

3. Process Isolation by Service Packs/Updates: Recent updates or service packs to Windows Server 2019 might have introduced changes to how processes are handled or isolated. Make sure the server is fully updated, and consider any recent changes that might have affected this.

Elisabet

[try67]

Are you just copying and pasting responses from ChatGPT?

[TeMatcha]

No... why?

[TeMatcha]

I'm an expert and I had the afternoon off, so I thought about helping out communities.

[try67]

Is that so? Here's a part of what ChatGPT has to say when asking it the question above:

That's quite a coincidence...

[Thom Parker]

@try67 After looking at the post. I think they must be some kind of new AI. Maybe something Adobe did to answer forum questions. Why not?

[try67]

No problem if they are, but they should identify themselves as such and not pretend to be an "expert" answering these questions. As you well know, AI often provides very bad answers to some basic questions, and people should know who or what they're getting these answers from, especially if it's an Adobe tool.

[Thom Parker]

Totally agree! 

However I've now seen plenty of GPT generated code and it's crap. These answers are good. I think the new Chat GPT 4 must be a major improvement. Could be we're seeing a test.  Or something is going on. It's suspicious to see so many questions answered in a row. And many of the questions are suspicious as well, cause they are way outside the usual posts. Why would there be a line of unusual questions answered by an AI. It's almost like the question and answers have been taylored. So that when you typed the question in to GPT it responed with the same answer. 

[try67]

Some spammers use ChatGPT to answer questions and get some positive reputation on the forums, before they start including spam links in their posts, so they don't get kicked away immediately. Other people just like to pretend to be experts when all they do is copy questions into an AI, and paste its answers to the forum...