iShare Health Check - Essential Maintenance Tasks

Overview

In order to keep your iShare instance running smoothly it is important that you keep on top of things like clearing log files to free up disk space and database tasks to keep performance at its best.

Here we have put together a list of things that should help. Some of these Tasks are one-off configuration changes and others should be performed on a regular basis.

General Tasks

  • Configure Disk Space warnings for your Servers. If the space runs out then this could cause iShare to fail. Customers who use Astun's hosted solution don't need to worry about this as Disk Space warnings are already in place.
  • Check that Windows Updates and MSE (Microsoft Security Essentials) are enabled. Also use the Windows Cleanup Tool (cleanmgr.exe) to remove unwanted files that may be accumulating, such as old Windows Update files.
  • Automate the Backup of your PostgreSQL database(s) (Backing up your Database) and regularly check that the backup files are being generated in the configured location. This location is specified in either the local_locn or remote_locn in your Database Backup Configuration. Ensure old Database Backups are being deleted as per the days setting in the Database Backup Configuration.

  • Automate the clean up of MapServer / PostgreSQL & iShare temporary files with Studio Workflow
  • Automate the clean up of iShare Log files e.g. log4net

Make sure that you regularly check that these Jobs complete successfully.

Tuning Tasks

There are several areas within iShare that can be fine tuned to give a better performance:

Logging in iShare

Changing the verbosity of the logging will have an affect on the speed of data access as well as an increased in size of the log files. Making sure that DEBUG is switched back off if it has been enabled will reduce the size of .log files.

There are a variety of log files produced by different areas within iShare for example: