By Mats Halfvares, the Content Studio development team

The new Service Manager in Content Studio version 5 replaces the old infrastructure, built on the MS Message Queuing Services, that was used in previous versions of Content Studio. The Service Manager handles asyncronous and syncronous events and background tasks in Content Studio and implemented as a regular multithreaded service it can be configured according to the need of your web site. During execution, at a certain pull-interval, every thread in the Service Manager asks Content Studio if there is any job to do. If a job is found it will be assigned on the first thread that finds it. The jobs are distributed on a queue basis so that the oldest jobs gets distribute first. Each thread traverses round among the installed websites on the server until it finds a job. Each thread are assigned its own thread id and even thread traverses the sites in the highest to lowest order and the uneven traverses the sites in reverse order. Between each site, each thread wait the pull interval before asking the next site for more jobs. Since you never know how long an individual job will take it is not possible to predict when a job will be executed.

New functionality in Content Studio 5.2

In version 5.2 a new background service, Dynamic Event Processor (DEPRO) has been introduced. This service currently has two main purposes; manage the new OnDocumentPublished, OnDocumentUnPublished and OnDocumentArchive events and to detect when a background job should be created for a document subscription. DEPRO is to its nature more low priority compared to the regular Service Manager that exectutes jobs it finds in the Event Actions queue. For this reason this process runs with fewer threads and not as often as the main service. You can set these to higher values but that will increase the load on the database server. However, if you have many web sites on the same server this can be appropriate.

Security

The Service Manager runs by default under the Network service system account. This account is designed to be used by any service that needs network access and that runs with the lowest possible privilges on the local system. When the Network service communicates with other computers it will be identified by them as a regular machine account when the computer is a member server in Active Directory or a null session when communicating between stand-alone machines. In Content Studio a special privilege "ServiceQueueAdmin" is required to access the API:s used by the Service Manager and by default an account running as a service will have this privilege.

Configuring the service

You configure the Service Manager by setting a few values in the registry. As always, editing the registry can be dangerous and should only be done by knowlegeby personel since errors can make your computer impossible to use.

• Start RegEdit.
• Navigate to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Teknikhuset\Content Studio\5.0\ServiceManager.
• You now should see a number of values from the list below
  • Port (REG_DWORD)
    When running the TCP protocol this is the Port number. Default is 9792.
    This is the portnumber used by Content Studio server and you should never change this value. 
  • Protocol (REG_SZ)
    The remoting communication method to use, must be TCP or IPC. Default is TCP.
  • PullInterval (REG_DWORD)
    The time, in seconds, between each request made by a single thread. Default value is 20 seconds
  • Servername (REG_SZ)
    The name of the server, normally this name is localhost
  • SingleThreadMode (REG_DWORD)
    Used for debug purposes only, should be set to 0 (zero)
  • SupressResetWarnings (REG_DWORD)
    Set to 1 to have the Service Manager log only the first occurence of an error. Normally this value should be 1.
  • Threads (REG_DWORD)
    Regulates the number of threads to use this value can be between 1 and 8. Values more than 8 are ignored. Default value is 3.
    For Express Edition the number of avaliable threads are limited.
  • XmlIndexBatchSize (REG_DWORD)
    Regulates the size of batch used by the Service Manager when performing a background xml index update. Default value is 3.
  New Settings in CS 5.2
  • DynamicEventThreads (REG_DWORD)
    Defines the number of threads used by the DEPRO (Dynamic Event Processor). This value can be between 1 and 4 and values more than 4 are ignored. Default value is 1.
    For Express Edition the number of avaliable threads are limited.
  • DynamicEventCommandTimeout (REG_DWORD)
    Specifies the minimum database command time out value (in seconds) for the dynamic event processor. This value must be at least 30 sec which is the default value. There is probably no reason to change this value unless the the DEPRO reports Sql Server command time out errors.
  • DynamicEventPullinterval (REG_DWORD)
    Defines the pull interval (in seconds) used by each thread in DEPRO. This value can be between 5 and 600 and values more than 600 are automatically set to the maximum value (600). Default value is 120 (2 minutes).
• Change or add the values you need.
• Restart the Content Studio Service Manager service.
• Study the Content Studio Event log to see if any problems occurs.

Of the values above the only values you should work with is PullInterval, Threads, DynamicEventThreads and DynamicEventPullinterval. As a general rule for a web server with few Content Studio sites installed you should use a high value for PullInterval (more that 30 seconds probably) and only a few threads (one or two, perhaps). Using a many threads and short pull intervals will cause the Service Manager to cause an extensive amount of traffic both to Content Studio Server and SQL Server. However, for a Web server with a lot of sites installed you would like the oppsite since a lot of Web sites needs to be served.
During development when adding or removing indexed EPT fields occurs frequently you might need to set a higher pull interval in order to see changes more quickly.