Question

LFFTS Memory Usage

Laserfiche Search and Retrieval Version 10

Updated September 6, 2022

asked on April 7, 2018

Laserfiche 10.3 on Windows Server 2012.

What could cause LFFTS to be using 4.5 GB of memory when DCC and the Index have 0 queued documents? Search catalog optimization occurred this morning and has been complete for hours.

DCC and Search Engine Event logs appear error free. PerfMon is showing that LFFTS Server has 0 pages/words/docs indexed per second and 0 searches.

Any other ideas why LFFTS is using such a high amount of memory when seemingly nothing is happening?

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Replies

replied on September 6, 2022 • Show version history

I spoke to Laserfiche who tried a load of things, but in the end the problem that was causing the memory hoarding issue was the optimizations. My system was optimizing every night despite being less that 1% fragmented.

I found what is causing memory issue is that the optimization reads the whole of the index file into memory and does not release the memory once it is finished.

You can see this if you run RAMMAP and look in the File Summary or File Detail tabs. LFLink.idx will be in the list. Once the service is restarted the memory is dumped.

You can turn this off in the registry by changing HKLM>Software>Laserfiche>LFFTS>Config>EnableSmartOpt to False.

This will mean that Optimizations will only run when fragmentation reaches 85% this is set by registry entry HKLM>Software>Laserfiche>LFFTS>Database>{Catalog name}>FragmentPercent.

Or you can run optimizations yourself.

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replied on May 6, 2019

"LFFTS uses all the memory available on the machine" is one of the crazier things I've read lately.

This, uh, design decision is causing major issues at every upgrade.

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replied on June 26, 2019 • Show version history

Yep, or not even having an obvious way to change this. I can see Laserfiche staff have marked this as "not helpful". It's not helpful to have this as an on-going issue for over a year.

I've found I need to occasionally restart the service and set the limit back again to stop it grinding the whole server to a halt.

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replied on May 6, 2018

Please see https://support.laserfiche.com/devnotes/viewer?name=LFFTS9.2%2FTroubleshooting about LFFTS memory management. In short, LFFTS uses all the available memory on the machine for better performance. If there are other services running on the machine, administrators could cap LFFTS memory usage by the config utility. The value of the limit depends on the machine and how much memory the other services need.

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View 3 previous replies

replied on May 7, 2018 • Show version history

LFFTS consuming all available memory doesn't seem to be an efficient way to handle the service. I've found that LFFTS consuming too much memory is the main cause of a 500 Internal Server Error received by users when they try to initiate a business process from a toolbar button. When LF Server memory was >95%, this error would happen, and every time, LFFTS was occupying the majority of the server's RAM. This could be avoided by distributing LFFTS, I suppose, but that's not available in many system configurations.

Thank you for the information, Yiping! I will keep this information in mind for the future!

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replied on July 23, 2018 • Show version history

Running into this upgrading to 10.3.1 from 9.1.1. I agree with @████████, that using all available memory is not an efficient default behavior. Especially for those of us who put workflow and other servers on the same machine as LFFTS. Ultimately, this results is very poor performance for the entire system, not just the LFFTS.

At first, I thought this memory problem was from workflow until I looked into it more.

@████████, thanks for posting the instructions for capping LFFTS memory.

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replied on September 20, 2018

Thanks Yiping for the info about Capping LFFTS Memory Usage.

Is there any documentation that talks about what Max Memory should be available for WF and Forms?

I looked at the Release notes for 10.3.1, but do not see any information for this- https://support.laserfiche.com/kb/1013948/release-notes-for-laserfiche-10-3-1

Thanks,

Jeff Curtis

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replied on September 21, 2018

I found that the instructions @████████ posted do not work. The server kept maxing out memory usage no matter how low I set the LFFTS cap. I suspect is the indexing function that is causing the problem. If I pause the index in the LF Admin console, the memory stays under control.

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replied on September 21, 2018

Kenny, I'm not sure if it's related, but I'm finding that my index is frequently coming up as read-only. I've fixed the issue several times, but it seems to keep going back to read-only. We have the memory cap under control with the memory cap, but something may be wrong with the indexing function that may have contributed to the memory leak

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replied on September 21, 2018

I ran into that a few times too. I don't remember what I did to get it to go away other than stop the index and service, delete the files and rebuild the index a few times.

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replied on April 8, 2018

I've seen the same thing with a customer. In their case, they use content searching exclusively. I had assumed that was the cause of the high memory usage. I've not investigated it.

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replied on May 3, 2018

We are experiencing the same thing on 10.3.1, Server 2012. It seems to be triggering at some point overnight, maxing out the memory on the server to the point that no one can get into Laserfiche. If I restart the server every morning, it is then OK for the rest of the day.

We are running the Distributed Computing Cluster, but all it's supposed to do is search for non-OCR'd documents and OCR them on my workstation. I've left for the evening with only a few small documents, and my workstation isn't doing anything in the am. I wouldn't think it would be related, but the issue started after we re-licensed the DCC several days after upgrading from 10.2.1 to 10.3.1.

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replied on May 3, 2018

The proposed resolution from Laserfiche Support was to use the LFFTS config file to cap the memory available for the LFFTS service. More info can be found here:

https://www.laserfiche.com/support/webhelp/Laserfiche/10/en-US/administration/#../Subsystems/LFAdmin/Content/search_engine_configuration_utility.htm

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replied on May 3, 2018

Troubleshooting this with a customer now. I set the RAM limit via the config utility, and then out of nowhere the lflink.idx loaded into memory- 9GB of it, and completely defeated the workaround. I've seen this on two other 2012 servers as well. What's the long term resolution?

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replied on May 6, 2018

What's whole output of showmem command in the config utility? And what's the exact version of LFFTS.exe?

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replied on January 27, 2019

Has anyone found a solution to this? I've got a client on 2008 R2 server running 10.3.1. At this point, we have to restart lffts every morning at 4:00 AM. Even with that, the lffts sometimes consumes all of the server's memory (32 GB) short after users log in for the morning. Once reset, it seems to work fine for the rest of the day. I've put various limits on the amount of memory lffts uses with showmem. For the most part, the service respects that limit but at some point, the limit gets crossed and it consumes the rest of the server's memory resources.

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replied on March 8, 2022

This is painful. We too have the same issue. CPU maxing out at 100% and a reboot is required at least every other day, sometimes the next day. No fix for this?

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replied on June 22, 2022

I am having the same issue. I have set a memory cap of 0.5Gb and the in Task manager the service is using 534Mb but the memory still increases and restarting the service fixes it.

I downloaded RAMMap and it shows that the bulk of the memory is tied up in Mapped Files and restarting the service clears that back to a lower level.

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replied on June 22, 2022 • Show version history

We put it on its own VM server so it can't hurt anything else. Then, you have to hack a file for audit trail to find the service when its on a different machine from audit trail or the LF server.

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replied on June 22, 2022

That is the line I'm considering if I can sweet talk someone into spinning up a new VM for me. What is involved with the audit log stuff?

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replied on September 1, 2022

One of our customers is having this issue as well (LF 10.4 on 2012 Server). It started last week, the LFFTS service uses up to 10GB and them the system becomes slow - LF Server and LFFTS are installed on the same machine. After a LFFTS service restart eveything works well.

Yesterday it happened overnight, today also and again after lunchtime. We're trying to verify if their daily use routine has changed, but nothing worth for now.

Anyone has any clue why this happens? We'll re-index the repository on Friday night to see if it fixes this issue.

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LFFTS Memory Usage

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