U4-3189 - Umbraco 6 distributed call, can't ping itself on startup

Just to add to this - I have the same issue, however, this fix didn't work.

My symptom is that when I turn distributed calls on, the site just hangs on startup and I have to kill the IIS process

The above code change didn't work for me.

Where is your process stuck, if you look at umbracoTrace?

I was having this exact same issue, implemented the change above and it still didn't work. However, I hadn't removed the Admin server from the umbracoSettings.config file, once I did this it worked perfectly.

Thanks for spotting this

The //TODO statement on line 395 of the DefaultServerMessenger.cs file implies there would be a performance gain from implementing this fix, as well as resolving the issue that some of us are experiencing: https://github.com/umbraco/Umbraco-CMS/blob/6.1.6/src/Umbraco.Core/Sync/DefaultServerMessenger.cs

Fixing the TODO statement in there is a tricky one which is why it hasn't been done yet since we cannot detect which server in the list matches the current server executing. In some scenarios we can, in others we cannot.

In the meantime can I get some more background info on this - Can you tell me why a distributed call is being made on server startup? AFAIK the Umbraco core doesn't perform CRUD operations during startup so distributed calls will not be made. Are you running some custom code on startup that is performing any CRUD?

Doh! By CRUD I actually just mean the CUD part ..

On server startup, umbraco is pinging the distributed servers to check which one are alive and should receive a distributed call.

Is this something custom that you've written? There's nothing in the core that ping's the distributed servers on startup.

no it is default behavior, the custom code I wrote was to workaround the problem

Ok, so a different question - do you have any event handlers running on startup? i.e. to publish/save/update content, etc... ?

Are you also able to tell me what kind of distributed call is being made that fails (i.e. content, media, etc...) during startup?

Again, we don't 'ping' servers on startup, the only time a distributed calls is made is when an entity is saved/updated/deleted/etc...

So, to be clear about the issue I am having - I have 2 web servers (no separate authoring server) "web1" and "web2", but with no authoring server. I enter both server names into the umbraco.config (the file is replicated across both servers, so needs to stay the same).

As soon as I enable the distributed call (enabled="true") and restart the app pool, the site just hangs (same symptoms as the main issue, just slightly different configuration). This wasn't an issue in Umbraco v4 as we've had this setup for years.

The only handlers I have are on publish/new doc...nothing on-startup...the same handlers I hook into my v4 sites.

The only thing I can think of when this might occur is if there is no xml cache file on the server and during startup it gets generated and potentially sends a distributed call. I'll need to check, will have a look on Monday.

In any case, I realize the underlying problem is that if distributed calls are made during startup it cannot do it because it's waiting for a response from itself but it hasn't initialized yet. I'm fairly sure this would fix this issue: U4-2633