The GroupWise POA Gradually Consumes Server memory

  • 7001341
  • 11-Sep-2008
  • 27-Apr-2012

Environment

Novell GroupWise 7
Novell GroupWise 6.5

Situation

The POA gradually consumes memory until the server becomes unresponsive and must be rebooted.
 
Every server & post office will have different statistics, for example: With 100-120 users the gwpoa.nlm after a server boot takes 7.3 Meg of memory. After 3 days it takes 594 Meg of memory, and continues to slowly climb.
 
The verbose POA log reports:
ERROR: "Error: More than 6000 fields [D11A] User:[user]"

Resolution

Enable Verbose logging on the POA.
 
Use NetWare's SEG.nlm and monitor memory utilization in the mornings as the bulk of GroupWise users login.
 
Review the GW POA morning log files.  Look for "Error: More than 6000 fields [D11A] User:[user]".
Every line that you see this error indicates there may be a message that can not be auto-archived. 
 
Look into your auto-archive policies to help determine what kind of message (email, appointment, task, note, etc.) you should be looking for that the POA Errored on.
 
For example: 
If your policy is to auto archve Calendar, Tasks and Notes older than 90 days.
Login to the user's (in the error) mailbox and look for any items older than 90 days that have Not archived.
If you find any items older than 90 days, you should investigate the item.
Try opening the item and any/all attachments. 
Make note of any errors you see, and troubleshoot accordingly.
You may need to run GWCheck for this user/msg db, or perhaps the entire post office.
 
In this particular situation, there were a handful of users that had appointments in their Sent Items folder that were several years old, that were not being auto-archived.
Once these old messages were deleted, the POA no longer consumed excessive memory.