Sage 100

Hi all - Please let me know if you have any thoughts about the following questions. I just had a client who was experiencing ""connection timed out"" errors when running Sage 2013 as a service change this afternoon to running it as a desktop application instead. Now they have two questions that I'm not sure how to answer: 1.They'll see 1-2 windows minimized to the Taskbar that shows the IP address of the server or another workstation. No user has ""spawn tasks"" selected, so any idea what these are? 2.The memory use multiplied about 5-6 times for each process when running as a desktop application. The typical we see is about 3000-4000K in Task Manager, but now the majority of them are showing upwards of 25000-30000. What happened, and will these lead to other types of performance issues or errors?

Amber, I can't answer the memory usage as it relates to running Sage 100 Advance as an Application versus a Service, though we have seen this time out issue with it running as a Service. We found a setting in the registry of the server that allowed more services to run at two of our clients which has help this issue. Our issue was all users could not log in to Sage even though we had enough user licenses and we had random kick off. Let me know if you want to try to change the registry and run as a service, I will look through my articles and send you the fix.

Thanks Ron. I'm familiar with the registry edit you're speaking of and have seen that resolve issues with other clients in the past. This client's IT contact, however, does not agree that it is applicable to Server 2012 so he has not tested the change.

He may be right, I have seen this resolve issues with Server 20013 and 2008, 2012 may have resolved the settings.

I've experienced this as well in 2013 install, don't recall if Server 2008 or 2012. Both issues 1 & 2, however it was the clients IT who came back and said he made a few setting changes on the server which corrected the memory issue. He never said what those changes were, darn.

Had recent similar issues. Let IT pull their hair out another week. Then they'll try the registry change.I believe we had to make the registry change even though it shouldn't have been required. I also think it fixed our issues which drove everyone crazy - this was on a 2013 ""upgrade"".

@AmberStoneburg I'm the actual author of that KB article (vast majority of it anyway) and I speak IT so I could potentially help in explaining the actual background and discovery behind it. A couple of things for now: 1) The minimized taskbar windows is from an App Server INI file setting. Can't remember which one. But it's not related or shouldn't be related to the setting Spawn Tasks from Application Server. Spawn Tasks is often necessary on some kinds of networks. 2) The extra memory per session - remember there is a desktop registry heap size as well as the services heap size. So depending on the current value of the 2nd value (desktop) you may need to make the registry edit anyway then reboot server for it take effect. 3) For your particular issue where an excessive amount of RAM was used per session, I've seen those symptoms with MAS running in a VM where the number of CPUs and physical RAM was insufficient for the number of users and session.

Wayne/Joan, thank you for confirming that this does occur with others. Alnoor, thank you for the much-needed explanation. I will share with client.

@AlnoorCassim @MichelleBennion - Alnoor - I found the article about the registry settings. At one point it mentions, ""highly recommended you attempt this solution (run as application) before attempting to edit the Windows registry..."" We have been trying to push the customer to running Sage as an application with FireDaemon. Apparently, their hosting/IT company reboots the server almost on a nightly basis - so running as a standard application just won't work. I wanted to get your thoughts - FireDaemon vs. modifying the registry???

As an alternate solution, you can find reghacks on the interwebs that turn on automatic logon for Windows servers. Then you can run it as an application even with reboots. I'm not sure of the security implications. Anyway, just a thought. Here's one from Microsoft: http://support.microsoft.com/324737

@EricAnderson the mention of highly recommended as an application was from me for a previous era of MAS and Windows Servers. In my own experiences, since Server 2008 R2 and higher and with MAS 4.50+, I've had several good experiences with running the App Server as a service so long as it's running with an appropriate domain account and the heap size settings in the registry are set appropriately for the service. I'm also very familiar with the Microsoft Autologon utility (originally a Sysinternals utility from Mark Russinovich) which can accomplish the desktop app login - http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb963905 - it would be easier to push this to IT. I'm not familiar with FireDaemon. In the end since the server needs to get rebooted nightly, my take is either Autologon or run as a service

thanks @AlnoorCassim ! - looks like we've got some options, just need the IT team to buy into one of them.

@AmberPrayfrock We have a client running MAS 200 4.5 as a service report the ""connection time out"" issue beginning late Monday. We disabled PEP and resolved the problem. Even though Sage reportedly fixed their side, we are opting to disable PEP and not install the patch separately.