[Building Sakai] Unisa problems

[Arlow, Magdaleen]

This message (and attachments) is subject to restrictions and a disclaimer. Please refer to http://www.unisa.ac.za/disclaimer for full details.
________________________________

We are having serious problems with our Sakai configuration and database connections. We suspect it is the connection pooling, but we are not even sure. We are running Sakai 2.9.1 running 9 nodes with an Oracle database.  Each node pair is running on an Apache HTTP server with 16GB memory linked to a tomcat server with 24GB memory (20GB heap). The split to put apache and tomcat on two different servers were done recently in an attempt to improve throughput.

We upgraded to Sakai 2.9.1 in October 2013. We did not experience problems with the release right away, but it is now a new academic period with a wider range of learning activities.

We have an Oracle 11G database on IBM AIX, planning to move to an Exadata server as soon as possible. We run commons-dbcp 1.2.2 database pooling. We are also considering upgrading to version 1.4 as suggested on the web, but this is not the Sakai kernel setup.

Since middle December we started having problems where the technical team has to restart nodes very often. We thought that an upgrade to better infrastructure would solve the problem. We have upgraded to better servers, but at the moment many users do not even get the landing page of myUnisa.

We see the JIRAS KNL-600 and KNL-1011 as related to our problems. We'll welcome any advice or suggestions. Please let us know if you need more info to give input.

Kind regards
Magdaleen Arlow on behalf of the Unisa team
ICT Department

' +27 (0) 12 429 3102
Cell + 27 (0) 82 783 9163
Email : arlowm at unisa.ac.za<mailto:arlowm at unisa.ac.za>

[cid:image001.gif at 01CF20FD.670095A0]

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://collab.sakaiproject.org/pipermail/sakai-dev/attachments/20140203/7f8638de/attachment.html 
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: image001.gif
Type: image/gif
Size: 10773 bytes
Desc: image001.gif
Url : http://collab.sakaiproject.org/pipermail/sakai-dev/attachments/20140203/7f8638de/attachment.gif