Handling Unresponsive Server Processes (UNIX Systems)

IBM® SPSS® Modeler Server processes may become unresponsive for several reasons, including situations where they make a system call or ODBC driver call that becomes blocked (call never returns, or takes a very long time to return). When UNIX processes enter this state, they can be cleaned up using the UNIX kill command (interrupts initiated by IBM SPSS Modeler client, or the closing of IBM SPSS Modeler client, will have no effect). A kill command is provided as an alternative to the normal stop command, and enables an administrator to use modelersrv.sh to easily issue the appropriate kill command.

On systems which are susceptible to the accumulation of unusable (“zombie”) server processes, we recommend that IBM SPSS Modeler Server is stopped and restarted at regular intervals, using the following sequence of commands:

cd modeler_server_install_directory
./modelersrv.sh stop
./modelersrv.sh kill

Those IBM SPSS Modeler processes that are ended using the modelersrv.sh kill command will leave behind temporary files (from the temporary directory) that will need to be removed manually. Temporary files may be left behind in some other situations too, including application crashes due to resource exhaustion, user interrupts, system crashes, or other reasons. Therefore we recommend that, as part of the process of restarting IBM SPSS Modeler Server at regular intervals, all remaining files are removed from the IBM SPSS Modeler temporary directory.

Once all server processes have been closed and temporary files have been removed, IBM SPSS Modeler Server can be safely restarted.