Tuesday 24 January 2017

The Mysterious Case of the Essbase Hang


You would think that this was from the archives given that we're talking about an unpatched version of Essbase 11.1.2.2 but no, this happened recently. A customer had been using Essbase quite happily for years on an unpatched version of Essbase 11.1.2.2 when one day it stopped working.

The symptoms were strange, the applications and databases would startup correctly and it was possible to retrieve data and export all data but as soon as data was sent into the application via spreadsheet lock and send or via a load rule then the application would hang and CPU would spike. There were no error messages in any of the application or server logs and the only way to get the application back was to kill the ESSSVR process. This meant you could retrieve data but you would be back to square one if you tried loading or calculating anything...not much use really.

After some head scratching and questioning of the IT department it turned out that they had recently applied a package to the Linux kernel. With this information MOS came to the rescue:

Essbase Dataloads and Calculations Hang or Spike CPU to 100% after Applying Linux Operating System Package (glibc-2.5-107) (Doc ID 1531236.1)

We rolled back all the glibc packages and Essbase started working again as if by magic.

Thankfully this client is now one of our Manged Services customers and we shall soon be upgrading them to Essbase 11.1.2.4 where Linux kernel issues should be a thing of the past.

Case closed. Watson, go make me a cup of tea...