MS Processes & Services

Report · Sep 12, 2007

I am using RoboScource Control 3 with RoboHelp HTML 6 on a PC running Win XP SP2.

At startup, before launching RH, I check the Windows Task Manager and I observe that memory usage for sqlserver.exe is 27 MB. After I launch RH, memory usage for sqlserver.exe climbs above 100 MB. At some point, file checkouts and checkins slow to a crawl (i.e., as many as five minutes for each file). If I exit RH, sqlserver.exe continues to live and continues to consume 100+ MB of memory with checkouts and checkins continuing to take forever. I would like to be able to stop and restart sqlserver.exe. My hope is that memory will be freed and that checkouts and checkins will require seconds rather than minutes.

Because two other executables in Task Manager might be related to sqlserver.exe, I hesitate to kill the process for sqlserver.exe. Those other processes are RSO3MiddleTierService.exe and RSO3Server.exe. Beyond the executables, three Services are running that might control the executables: SQL Server, RSO3 Middle Tier Service, and RSO3 Server.

I realize that I can resolve my issue by rebooting, but that is time-consuming in that I usually have several applications open and I must save all of my work before closing them then find my place again in each application after rebooting.

As an alternative to rebooting, if I exit RH, can I safely restart those services? Would there be a particular order for restarting them? Your thoughts and suggestions are appreciated.

Report · Sep 13, 2007

If you (and anyone else accessing RSC) exit RH first, it should to be fine to stop and restart the three RSC services. I don't know much about the protocol of stopping and starting sqlserver.exe, though, so I'll let someone else address that.

More importantly, it sounds like you have a bigger problem. If you consistently find your pc in this bogged-down state, then it would seem that the pc itself isn't up to the task of hosting RSC. And it's not just CPU and memory usage -- there's also lots of disk accesses going on, too. If you are the only author associated with the project, do you really need RSC? If there are multiple authors, I'd strongly suggest that you try to find a separate server to host your RSC project.

G

Report · Sep 14, 2007

Thank you for the input. I appreciate the advice about the services. You raise good points. Perhaps, I should clarify a bit.

My PC only bogs down when checking in/out files of RSC. After files are checked out, RH works fine. All other apps work fine.

I am the only staffer writing electronic help. On the premise of simplicity, I didn't use RSC in the beginning. Then an RH project lost lots of data without explanation and without any means of recovery. My boss wanted to avoid a repeat. I saw two options: manual backups or automated backups. I chose automated. We already had VSS on a server in-house, so I tried it with RH but it would bog down at times when checking in/out files. I lacked privileges to test the source of the problem (i.e., was it VSS, the server, the network, local install of RH?). Since none of the delvelopers had any problems with VSS, I was asked to experiment with RSC and MS SQL Express locally (where I already have privileges). So far, the common thread is RH with versioning.

Report · Sep 14, 2007

Yes, I can understand where you're coming from. I wish I was a little more conversant with sql operation so that I could offer better advice on that aspect, but I would guess that starting and stopping it locally would be fine. What I'd suggest doing first, though, is making a local backup of your source project. We make a practice of doing so, even though we use RSC. (And it turns out that having zipped versions of the projects is surprisingly useful in ways that we didn't initially anticipate.)

I did notice, BTW, that opening up RSC Explorer at the same time I was trying to open a large RH project (not a source-controlled one, incidentally) brought my pc to its knees. I intend to be more patient next time and wait for RH to finish initializing before jumping into the RSC Explorer.

So if it were me, I'd back everything up, turn off any unnecessary apps, and give the service restart a trial run.

G