Who is this article for?

IT Administrator responsible for installing Please Review.

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This article includes some troubleshooting points for a load balanced Please Review installation.

1. General Advice
2. File locations
   1. Available diskspace
3. Database
4. Further Reading

1. General Advice

In a load balanced setup typically, either one server is running and the other server as failover, or is it setup with both running at the same time, but importantly, with session affinity so that once a session is setup with one of the servers, all subsequent requests only go to that server for that user's session.
 
Also the web application for Please Review, in IIS, and the service, TaraService, in the Windows Services list, need to be running as the same domain user here on all the PR severs. 
 
The user in question should also have full permission over both the DocumentFiles folder and the Temp folder. For more details see the further reading below.

2. File Locations

In the Runtime\config\config.xml there are two main file locations here:

<add key="Tara.Temp.Dir" value="Data/Temp" />
<add key="Tara.Filestore.DataDir" value="Data/DocumentFiles" />

The FileStore, or DocumentFiles folder, should be in a shared location that all the servers can access. You would typically use a network file share where Please Review (web application and service) run as a domain user that can access these shares.

The Temp folder only needs to be accessed by the server itself so should not be put in a shared location. It can cause conflicts with file access so this should be kept somewhere local. You shouldn't need to change this location unless drive space is low where Please Review is installed, but even then, it should really remain as a local folder, not a shared or network one. If this is in a shared environment, this could cause errors such as "The process cannot access the file '\\NetworkShare\PleaseReview\Data\Temp\docoutput_......dir\docoutput.docx' because it is being used by another process."

2.1. Available diskspace

Depending on how the share is setup the amount of remaining diskspace may not be accurate when viewed on the server. If it is done using an allocation, then you may need to check on the system that sets that allocation up (for example, this might be Azure), if you are getting messages indicating the system is out of diskspace, yet Windows Explorer suggests there is still diskspace.

4. Database

The database should be accessible on one address. Some customers may consider also load balancing the database. If this is done, it must be done in such a way that any updates and reads are instant. We have seen where updates are made to a database and then PR reads values back based on what it just updated in the database, but it hit the other load balanced server where that data was not yet showing and that broke PR as it expected the data to be there. This type of load balanced setup for the database server is not supported. 

Such an unsupported setup can cause multiple errors throughout the system as intermittently data PR just put in the database is no longer being found and it would put the system in a very bad state if this was occurring.

Whatever method is used, it must be that any updates, if read back at the very next transaction, the data must be present. Whilst we can't provide more specifics on this as this is outside of standard support, we hope this information is enough to ensure, with the help of your database administrator, for you to chose a suitable setup.

4. Further Reading

More details on installing in such an environment can be found in Enterprise Deployment guide applicable to the version you are installing.

You will find this in the links on the server download page for each version of Please Review.