This problem went away for a few days, but restarted a couple of nights ago. It still happens at 3am. I have not been able to observe what happens at that time and suspect that if I try I won't see the problem. I suspect that Apple's evolving power management features are part of the problem and that if a user were interacting with the system at 3am, we wouldn't see this because the system would not be idle. Spending the night on site, which is an hour away, isn't an option, nor is getting up in the middle of the night and remotely logging in in the hope I can observe an obvious problem.
I believe I've done everything I can using the pmset command to prevent sleep, standby etc. It isn't clear if you can totally turn power management off everywhere though. In researching this problem I also discovered the 'caffeinate' command. This is a command-line system utility that is supposed to prevent the computer from sleeping. I haven't tried it yet. Has anyone here used it? If so, can you describe how? I first deployed this system in 1995 under 3.x and it has provided continuous near 24/7/365 service since then. It has a small, but global user base which is primarily web-based. The machine in question is the web 'client', but it also runs a Apache for static web content and an SFTP server. This system has remained largely unchanged functionality-wise in the last 10 years. The main structure changes have been those required to upgrade major 4D versions. I maintain this system, but haven't implemented many newer 4D features. I've tried to stay aware of how 4D has changed. While I can appreciate Apple's intentions with the power management features, my experience has been that they increasingly work against running 4D 24/7. This system is deployed on a network at a govt. agency. Their cyber security people force us to run the latest OS. No recent OS upgrade seems to go smoothly 4D-wise. The 4D client in question had always run for weeks or even months w/o problems, but every Mac OS upgrade seems to lessen that. Moving this web system to Windows is not an option. We do run 4D Server on Windows. I have a number of controls in place to to ensure that the system is running. 1. Auto-launch 4D Remote in web serving mode if it is not running. I can toggle this on/off. This is done with a combination of shell scripts and AppleScript. Apple's Launchd system manages this. 2. Continuously monitor the 4D web server. Every few minutes an off-site monitoring agent requests a simple dynamically generated page. If the request times out, or if the response contains unexpected content, I get notified. These requests provide an added benefit of keeping 4D busy during light or no usage periods. 3. There is not an easy way to externally determine if 4D, or any Mac OS desktop app has hung. You can easily detect if 4D is running, but not when it is non-responsive. For us this is when 4D has encountered a low-level error that can't be gracefully handled with an error handler. It doesn't help that any displayed dialogs provide little useful information. One solution is to have 4D run a process that writes a 'heartbeat' file every minute and have a system process check for changes to this file. If the file is present and hasn't changed in more than a few minutes, we'll assume that 4D has hung and run a script to kill it. At this point the auto-launcher from (1) above takes over. This is where we seem to be failing currently. If others have done (3) how do you implement your heartbeat? I write a current timestamp into the file every minute. That assumes the file exists and is writable. It usually is. Is there a better way that is more robust? I know that 4D has improved logging features, but I've never used them. What would I need to do to enable 4D to log between 2:45 and 3:15 AM? Thanks, Brad ________________________________________ From: Perkins, Bradley D Sent: Monday, October 30, 2017 9:08 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: 4D Remote hanging at 3am after upgrading to Hi Sierra. I think I found the problem. When I upgraded the server OS on Tuesday I had a second GUI login session open for the admin user as I needed to sudo to fix some permissions, etc (aka fast user switching). When I checked on the application early Saturday AM I realized I had left that user logged in with an idle terminal session. I also found that when I remotely logged in to to check on the 'web client' user that 4D was not running, but quickly launched (my login woke the system up). I suspect that power management features were causing the network and/or hard disks to 'sleep' at 3AM. We have not had problems since logging that user out. Therefore, even though you may think that Power Nap is configured to be off, it isn't totally. Brad Perkins. On 10/27/17, 3:02 PM, "Perkins, Bradley D" <[email protected]> wrote: I have grep'd everything in /var/log --- the files the the console displays -- and haven't found anything that is running at 3am. That is assuming of course that any system level activity would be logged. The closest entry is at 3:01 and that is when my monitoring script emails me the first of many messages that there is a problem. I was mainly asking here in case those that are more in tune with current Mac goings on were aware of anything new in High Sierra that might have caused problems with 4D. I'm not familiar with the use of 4D's debug/request log. Can that be turned on easily, or do I have to recompile the structure to enable it? I'm mainly interested in what is going on at the client. I'd also guess that whatever is hanging 4D might not get logged to the server. Thanks, Brad > From: JBellos <[email protected]> > Try turning on the debug/request log in 4D to see what's firing in your > application at that time, if anything.. > Also, look at the Mac Console log to see what's happening at 3 AM, if > there's anything unique running there that's not happening earlier. ********************************************************************** 4D Internet Users Group (4D iNUG) FAQ: http://lists.4d.com/faqnug.html Archive: http://lists.4d.com/archives.html Options: http://lists.4d.com/mailman/options/4d_tech Unsub: mailto:[email protected] **********************************************************************
