The Greatest Christmas Gift Ever

This post has been a long time coming but I have been busy lately with some project work due to the fact that I finally received my hotfix from Microsoft to allow me to build a French variation for my client.

This long ordeal began last September when we were getting ready to start building the French language version of a site for our client. I wanted to see which items would be copied over with the variation mechanism, so I ran it on our development environment. About three pages into the creation of the variation hierarchies, the variation deployment failed with a primary key violation. So I tried to delete the partially done French version and start over. Same thing happened.

So the next most logical thing to do was to call Microsoft and submit a ticket. After waiting for the call back and explaining the problem to the tech, as well as showing him through a net meeting, the tech finally came back and said there was a hotfix available for the problem. He sent me the hotfix and I installed it on the development server and ran the SharePoint Technologies Configuration wizard.

I thought I was off and running again so I created the French variation label and clicked to build the hierarchies. This time it ran for 4 hours and then died with an error message that read "Server out of memory." I didn't think this was possible, so I poked into the SharePoint log files and found that sure enough the server had run out of memory. I looked further back in the logs and soon found out why it ran out of memory. There were hundreds of entries that read "Excessive number of SPRequests objects are not being disposed of. Check to make sure that SPWeb and SPSite objects are disposed." The number of request objects was around 964 when the server ran out of memory.

Once again I called Microsoft and submitted a ticket. I sat on the phone with the tech and explained the problem and what I did to get the error. Then I ran the typical SPSReports tool to gather information for them to look over. After a few weeks I received an email that said my case was being reassigned to a new tech. So the new tech called me and asked the same questions. He wanted to watch the server to see what happened so I reran the variations and he watched and I pointed out that SPRequests were not being cleaned up (this was something we realized we had to do earlier in this project in our own code). After 4 hours of being on the phone while it ran, the variations died with the server out of memory error. We reran the SPSReports tool and the tech said he would get back to me with the results.

About a week later I heard back from the tech that there wan one other person having this issue and that the SharePoint team was working on a hotfix for the issue. He said it should be out in the next two weeks. So I waited and waited and after two and a half weeks emailed the tech only to find out that my case was being passed onto another tech because the previous was going to training.

Now the third tech said that the hotfix should be out shortly and that they would let me know when. About a week later I received another email saying that this hotfix was not going to be included in SP1 and that I needed to hold off on installing SP1 until the post-SP1 hotfix was out. That was fine with me, it was more important to build this variation anyway. So I was optimistic that the hotfix would be out soon.

After about 6 more weeks of emailing back and forth with the techs about the status of the case, I finally received an email saying that the case had been escalated and that more resources were being put on the hotfix.

Another 2 weeks later, now almost Christmas and I finally received a call from someone at Microsoft saying that the hotfix was ready.

We installed the fix between Christmas and New Year's and it worked wonderfully. The 2,300 page site was built out in the French version. It appears that the hotfix calls the garbage collector more frequently and this causes the garbage collector to clean up those SPRequests that were lying around.

So now I am working on creating the French version of a very large site. Look for more posts soon about the issues that come up when building a multi-lingual site.