Timeouts when displaying any actions in the schedule tab of the web-UI after migrating to 4.2

This document (000020374) is provided subject to the disclaimer at the end of this document.

Environment

SUSE Manager 4.2

Situation

After an apparently successful migration of SUSE Manager from a previous version (4.0 or 4.1) to 4.2, some timeouts messages can be found when browsing to any of the actions of the "Schedule" menu on the left column of the web-UI, such as "pending actions", "failed actions" or "completed actions". The exact message of the error says "Request has timed out, please reload the page". The same error can be found in other sections of the web-UI, such as "System list" -> "Requiring reboot", and could be in other places without having been detected yet. The problem makes the sections unusable.

Resolution

Customers should run as root the following command.

echo "VACUUM ANALYZE;" | spacewalk-sql -

In case the problems are not fixed immediately, a reboot of the services would be suggested afterwards:

spacewalk-service restart

Cause

In the customer cases seen so far, Postgres was throwing messages to the logs regarding a query being forcibly closed, presumably this query was taking too long. This problem started happening only after 9.8, very likely after the migration. The query uses rhnUserActionOverview view and the web_contact table, which had a wrong value of 0 rows of length. The solution suggested triggers a postgres statistics refresh, and has been included as a part of the next maintenance update (which means in the very near future customers should not need to apply this workaround manually), as it also helps with the performance after many writes in the database (which is particularly important after the migration).

Status

Reported to Engineering

Additional Information

Customer should expect the fix being automatically applied to versions 4.2.2 and higher.

Disclaimer

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