Andrew, this is possible with a script. Our IT dept has done
it and I know others do it as well. Search the SolidWorks knowledge
base for the exact code to do this...
You can create a command file and have this as part of a
scheduled task function for your server. The command file should
simply read:
net stop "pdmworks server"
net start "pdmworks server"
The rest is simply a scheduled task operation with the .cmd file
begin the action to take. It is pretty simple to set up but you
need to have admin privilege on the host PDMWorks Server process
machine to set it up. Hope this helps.
This is a task I schedule once a week to reduce the occurrences of
crashing of the pdmworks vault server service. This is a known
issue by SolidWorks and SolidWorks support is saying this issue is
tied to a Microsoft Hotfix for IIS:
Microsoft® Hot Fix 831168 for PDMWorks® on a
Windows® 2003 Server. I have not put the hot fix in place yet
until I have time to test and investigate if this fix will conflict
with anything else.
This fix has not stopped our crashing issue, but it has
reduced occurance. I currently have a new issue. The pdmworks
add-in to SolidWorks and the SolidWorks Explorer locks up and is
non-responsive. I have two vaults established, one production and
one test each on different servers. The issue exists with the
production server vault but not the test server vault. Our
production pdmworks workgroup viewer (production vault) is
funtioning fine. I hate to restart the service as this will take
down production for 45 - 60 minutes while the vault rebuilds.
Perhaps we can discuss some of our settings, vault size, ect. ect.
and other details that we can find common and allow us to disect
some specifics.
Do you have the option set for validate vault upon re-start
of the vault? I have seen this correct some issues in the past. I
have it set to every start-up. The validate and start-up takes
about 22 minutes for us. We are managing about 11,500 documents in
our vault now.
No, the validate vault is unchecked. We have about 30,000
files in the vault parsed into logical projects with no more than
1500 files per project folder. It takes 45 minutes to an hour for
the vault to come back online.
I would highly recommend checking it and re-starting the service.
You don't need to shut down the whole server, just stop and
re-start the PDMWorks service that is running. While re-starting
the vault will be un-available for 45 minutes for users wanting to
check in - not that horrible.
Thanks for the feedback. I had been troubleshooting this with
my VAR and they recommended unchecking the box. Believe me I have
tried it every way you can think of. Additionally by restarting the
pdm service it will disable the PDMWorks Workgroup viewing
capabilities as well, which is how our production floor gets
prints, so it literally shuts down all of production for that time
period (very bad issue). I have the task schedule run service stop
and start every Sunday to continually rebuild the vault and reduce
the issue. My VAR has stated this issue has occured with other
users as well abd SW is working on it, but the hot fix is the
primary recommendation.
On Sundays when it stops and re-starts, is the option for
validate vault checked? If its not, then a validate vault is not
happening when the service re-starts - at least thats how I
understand it...
We currently have over 58,000 documents in our vault catalog.
Weare set to validate our vault on every startup and a restart
takesapprox 15 minutes to complete. I've started to have a
scheduledrestart at 6am in the morning in the hope it will at least
keepthings running during the day but we do suffer problems
withdocuments that are on the server, disappearing from the vault
viewand only a restart will resolve the problem.
We also have a problem where the pdmwservice.exe service on
theserver reaches 99% cpu utilisation and have to end the process
andrestart again - very annoying for the users!!
Just curious. How are people counting the number of documents
in the vault? I use a program that checks how many documents are in
each project and then gives a total. If you are checking the folder
properties of the vault using windows explorer, then its going to
yield 2 vastly different numbers. For example, the number of
documents being managed is 11,500 for us from the project count
(you could also come to this number by performing a report on each
project in the vault for all document types -and then add them all
up). If I check in windows explorer, I find that there are 99,738
total files and that our vault is 43.4 GB in size.
I used the VaultAdmin tool, Search tab to check and see what
thedocument count was in our catalog to come up with our
total.However, if i used Windows Explorer to see how many files
there wasthe total would be well over 200,000
The 11,500 number I mentioned is the number of unique
document names. I have attached the program to count this. I
believe the number that the vault admin tool reports on the search
tab would include all the revisions of each unique document number
as well. I am not positive that the number reported there is
accurate to whats in the vault, as the way the help reads it seems
to be the number of items in the catalog that the indexing service
creates. It could be accurate, though, and assuming it is our vault
contains 28,940 unique revisions.
Ran the project count tool and we have a total of 22,456
documents.
Do you know if your IT dept has any problems running the
auto-restart script? I've had a couple of times where it does the
shutdown part ok but doesn't do the restart so when the users come
in they cannot connect until someone restarts it!!
I do not know of any problems starting the service back up - but
we have had situations where items in the vault were not showing
correctly i.e . files appear to be missing or shown more than once.
When that happens we re-start the service and those issues go away.
That only happens about once a year. Have you ever checked the log
file for PDMWorks when the service doesn't start? Have you ever
checked the windows application log files to make sure the command
was given to restart the vault?
The Enterprise option is one of 2 PDMW solutions we are currently
considering and we're hoping to speak to some other companies that
use the systems to get a feel for which one might work best for us,
but i'll be sure to keep you updated with any progress we make.
Pete