Re: help: web server keep crashing

Yimei Huang wrote in message <8b9dr8$pqn$1_at_news3.bu.edu>...

>we are using Oracle8i + MS IIS, and using asp to connect with database.
 when
>our new site launched, the IIS server keep crashing 3 times a day.
 <snipped>
>We use the similar asp files to connect to access server before, and put
>session time is 7mins. It works fine. but why it does not work with the
>Oracle8i. Something wrong with the asp? or something wrong with IIS? or we
>miss something?

From the sounds of it you are using ASP (active server pages) to dish out dynamic HTML. And your ASP pages connect to an Oracle 8i database? I assume that you are then also using an Oracle ODBC driver to access Oracle 8i? And from the sounds of it, an ASP page takes forever to load/run, irrespective of a 10 minute timeout.

I would say that the problem here points to IIS and ASP. Maybe even the ODBC driver. But I can not see how the problem can be related to the Oracle database backend...

A couple of things to keep in mind. IIS runs in a NT user account. Usually this account only has guest privs on that NT box. This prevents (in theory) a hacker hacking into the web server and gaining control of the NT box, as even if he breaks into the web server, he's breaking into a guest account.

Any CGI's and ASP's run, are also run in this account. This means that if the ASP uses an ODBC driver which in turns using something like SQL*Net, all that takes place in this user account. Correctly configuring this account is therefore important. By default guess privs do not allow access to various operating system resources.

Assuming that the account is setup correctly, next I would suggest to install the latest IIS patches.

If IIS still crashes with the ASPs, then you should start isolating the ASP's and debug that. Write a couple of simple test scripts and use that. Make sure that SQL*Net 8 and the Oracle ODBC driver works as expected. If that is still fine, then the only problem I can think of is the actually ASP code - maybe there's a bug somewhere that only appears when that combination of ASP, ODBC and SQL*Net is used..

Other tools I would use would be Performance Manager (it can sometimes point to a problem), and something like a Unix ps implementation for NT that shows which processes are created and so on.

The problem here is that there are many components that could cause the problem. In such a case I usually start from the top and work my way down, trying to isolate a component to test it, then test it with the next higher one and so on, until I'm satisfied that it works as it should. For example, the problem may be something as simply as insufficient page file space in that NT's box configuration. So I would think that starting with the operating system, then the account used, then ISS etc., working down the various layers to be the best approach to solve this problem.

regards,
Billy Received on Wed Mar 22 2000 - 00:00:00 CST