TCM is very slow and frequent restart of COM+ solves the problem for time being

Question

We are facing an issue with Tridion 2009 CME. As the TCM is getting slow very frequently. Not able to open any page/component and GUI getting irresponsive.

I have checked the logs (TCM/services logs/Event Viewer) and database logs as well but I did not found anything. I have also restarted the IIS web host for TCM GUI.

We are restarting (3-4 times a day) the COM+ and services but this also solves the problem for time being.

Please suggest areas to look into apart from these.

Answer 1

An often seen issue with SDL Tridion 2009 is that the SDL Tridion Content Manager COM+ application does not have a memory limit set and it will be using up too much memory on the server. There can be multiple causes for this, there are known memory leaks which have been solved by hotfixes, but it is also just a standard behavior of COM+ to not do a timely release of its resources which lead to high memory usage.

The only solution (besides making sure all required hotfixes are installed, contact Customer Support for the specific details) is to recycle the dllhost process when it takes up a pre-determined amount of memory.

You set this inside the Component Services -> Computers -> My Computer -> COM+ Applications properties on the Pooling & Recycling tab.

• Set Pool Size to 1
• Set Lifetime limit to 0
• Set Memory Limit to 524288 (512 MB) or choose your own limit (see note below)
• Set Call Limit to 0
• Set Activation Limit to 0

After making these changes, be sure to restart your system (or restart all the Tridion Services).

Note

With regards to the memory limit you set it is important to understand the recycling process. Once the set memory limit is reached, the COM+ application will be recycled, this basically means the following:

1. a new dllhost process is started for all new handles
2. the old dllhost process stays alive till all its handles are released

Because of #2, this basically means that at the time of first recycling, you will have two process alive which can consume your configured memory limit. So at minimum your system should have double the memory of the configured limit available.

But keep in mind, that COM+ is slow in releasing handles, so it can take time and is not uncommon to see the new dllhost process reach its memory limit and thus a third process is stated (while the first two are waiting for their handles to be released).

All in all, you will have to expect the dllhost process to consume a lot of memory on a busy server. So make sure you have enough memory on the machine, or outscale and balance the load over multiple servers.

Last note, upgrading to SDL Tridion 2013 should also certainly be considered as an option to get rid of this issue.

Answer 2

First thing I would check is memory consumption -- looking for a memory leak. Is your COM+ (dllhost.exe or dllhost3g.exe) process eating up more and more memory? Then check your code for memory leaks.

The most likely cause of memory leaks in Tridion 2009 is working with TOM.NET Interop COM+ objects in C# and not releasing them properly. They need to be demarshalled explicitly.

Have a look at http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/eaw10et3(v=vs.110).aspx in general and at Marshal.ReleaseComObject (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.runtime.interopservices.marshal.releasecomobject.aspx) in particular.

Answer 3

Could it be related with your database? How often do you update statistics on the DB?

I can't link to the Tridion 2009 documentation - because it's offline only - but the process for 2013 and Oracle is documented here and for SQL Server you should just make sure you run exec sp_updatestats regularly. I think it didn't change that much from 2009 times.