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How stable is Alfresco Share Community Edition?

goldmar

Hello guys,

we want to use Alfresco at our company and we've started a test project this week. Since we only need a collaboration tool with Document Management capabilities, we've decided to use Alfresco Share. My problem right now is that it seems to run extremely unstable. Until now we've already had a lot of problems:

Site invites don't work out of the box, users often can't accept the invites (we could fix this issue by using a workaround)
Using Folder Rules in Alfresco Share breaks the navigation ("Recently Modified" in the Document Library does not work - we did not find a way to fix this but it seems to be a known issue)
Thumnails don't work. A lot of users seem to be experiencing this problem.
Many features seem to be incomplete (e.g. Groups - if I add a group to a site, I can't see which members can actually access the site, I even can't check which users are inside that group - it's only possible by using the admin console)
Integration seems to be weak, too - why aren't due dates of tasks or workflow assignments automatically added to the calendar?
and finally, this is the most annoying thing and makes Alfresco Share sort of unusable: it crashes all the time. One time it happened after trying to move some files. Another time it happened after I deleted one file. I don't know why exactly it happens but these seem to be different bugs. Afterwards I can't use Alfresco Share anymore and get the "Wrapped Exception (with status template) …" error all the time. It goes away after restarting Alfresco with a full reindex but after restarting Alfresco about 3-5 times today, this started to annoy me really hard.

We're using Alfresco 3.3G Community Edition.

What do you think? Are there any people here who use Alfresco Share in a productive environment? Why does it crash all the time? Is the Enterprise Edition more stable? Right now trying out the Community Edition got me really scared… it feels like a beta version.

Regards,
Mark

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gnyce

So we recently upgraded (to 3.3G CE) from 3.2 CE, which was actually pretty stable for us. We _could_ have stayed with 3.2, as it was working quite well, was not crashing, etc., but we wanted access to the Datalists and the ability to create content (txt, xml, html) directly in the Document Library. We also are using the Share interface almost exclusively (with some CIFS as well). I will not say we are the heaviest users of it (yet), but I'm pushing it to get utilized more. In my opinion/experience, 3.3G is not as baked through-and-through as 3.2 was, but it was 'good enough' for us to move to. We worked around a CIFS problem, have another issue we are dealing with, and 1 more issue with invites (used to work, don't now) that I'm working on resolving. Having said that, it does not typically crash on me. We're running on CentOS 5 64-bit, Sun JVM, and I've changed the startup to dole out more RAM. Not sure if there is any magic bullet, but it (well, 3.2 did, too early to say with 3.3g) stays up/functioning for weeks at a time.

michaelc

In the same position.
Just starting to go down that road running 3.3g on Linux ( Red Hat )
Found Lots of minor issues, post notes in the forum, see no reply in a lot of cases.

System does not crash on me but uploads over say 500kb fail with no log errors, could be network issue, VM issue, But at this point this is our biggest error.
Current items still to resolve

Portal renders incorrectly in IE6

RSS Feed points to Localhost from the WIki

Document upload fails with documents over 500KB

Background color in tables not showing

Wiki indentation does not work

mrogers

If you think you have found "issues" then please make sure they are in raised in JIRA (issues.alfresco.com).
Then something can be done about getting them fixed.

In particular, can you check that your document upload problem has been raised.

mikeh

As Mark mentions, JIRA is the place for reproducible issues. Having said that…

Portal renders incorrectly in IE6

Sorry, we will no longer be fixing cosmetic IE6 issues. We'll make sure the functionality generally works, but layout issues are to be expected in the Community Edition with IE6.

RSS Feed points to Localhost from the WIki

I think there's already a JIRA ticket for this.

Document upload fails with documents over 500KB

I can't reproduce this locally. Is it any particular type of file?

Background color in tables not showing
Wiki indentation does not work

These are both related - there are open JIRA tickets for both.

Thanks,
Mike

michaelc

Thank you very much Mike Hatfield
to many mikes around, but that is always the case.
now I can state there being worked on.

The issue with the file upload I expect is a Network or VM issue as it only occurs when I upload to the server from outside.
If I upload from the server it works
My windows server works in all cases.

goldmar

Just an update…

Document Upload works fine here - even for 10mb Documents.

I don't know why but the crashing seems to have stopped!

I could resolve the thumbnail issue by adding -Djava.awt.headless=true to JAVA_OPTS in alfresco.sh. Still, it seems to be really strange that this isn't there by default?!

Also, we could not make CIFS work. So I reinstalled Alfresco using the WAR bundle and the Ubuntu tomcat package instead of the tomcat bundle - and CIFS started working. At least it did in the afternoon, right now it has stopped working again without me doing anything… I really don't understand this.

Anyway, I've got another question about the Enterprise Edition: So far I thought that it is just a supported version of Alfresco which was better tested and has less bugs. It is often suggested that the Community Edition is more up to date. But now it seems to me that there are also more features in the Enterprise Edition? From what I've seen, the permission management in Alfresco Share is more complete in the Enterprise Edition and there seems to be some Outlook Integration which is not present in the Community Edition? Is this correct?

zaizi

I could resolve the thumbnail issue by adding -Djava.awt.headless=true to JAVA_OPTS in alfresco.sh. Still, it seems to be really strange that this isn't there by default?!

This will stop the Web script debugger from starting up. Only need to define headless is true if installing on a server. Suspect majority of first installations is on a desktop machine.

Ainga

mrogers

<quote>Anyway, I've got another question about the Enterprise Edition: So far I thought that it is just a supported version of Alfresco which was better tested and has less bugs. It is often suggested that the Community Edition is more up to date. But now it seems to me that there are also more features in the Enterprise Edition? From what I've seen, the permission management in Alfresco Share is more complete in the Enterprise Edition and there seems to be some Outlook Integration which is not present in the Community Edition? Is this correct?
</quote>
In general community and enterprise have similar capabilities but there are Enterprise only features and also Community only features.
Enterprise only features tend to improve the management or scalability or support non open source stacks and extensions.
Community only features tend to be experimental and/or new features.

It depends upon the individual feature and who provides it to determine which release comes first, so for example bug fixes provided by Alfresco Engineering will tend to go into Enterprise first and vice versa for community provided features and fixes.

As for 3.3. Yes Enterprise is advance of Community w.r.t. IMAP support.

goldmar

I just want to report back on the stability issues we had with Alfresco. After some configuration changes, it seems to work flawlessly… apparently, many problems we had were related to the default open file handles limit in UNIX. After applying the fix from the wiki most of our problems were gone and it did not crash for a few weeks now.

In my opinion this should be mentioned in the Installation Guide of Alfresco; right now this is very hidden in the wiki.

kevinr

Good to know. FYI the 3.4.b community version of Alfresco, coming shortly, contains *many* bug fixes (from the merged 3.3 enterprise branch) and improvements. This should be a very nice release. It also includes significant performance improvements (at least 30% for common use cases) and uses approx 50% less temp java heap memory during general usage (compared to 3.3G) - we hope you like it!

Cheers,

Kev

gnyce

Can't wait for 3.4b then! Saw a recent build of it, looking good….

goldmar

Sounds interesting! 🙂

kevinr

I am reliably informed that it will be available later today…

Kev