Real tough problem!!!

[CeeBee]

Ok, here's the deal:
The ERP application that our company is using (Syteline 5) is based on Progress.
On some occasions we get an "Insufficient disk space or write access denied (296)" error while processing invoices - that is a Progress error. This problem has been going on for years, since we switched from a terminal-based interface to a Windows GUI intreface, was more frequent when using WinNT, but after upgrading to Win2K it's "almost gone", meaning that it occurs only once in a while without any explanation. A second attempt to run is successful 95% of times even on the same PC, without rebooting. Definitely there is plenty of drive space, access should have no reason of being denied only once in a while. The database resides on a server running IBM AIX. We have tried all suggestions from our software vendor, no luck though.
Has anyone had to deal with Progress and has any ideeas? For some reason we can not go directly and talk to Progress, tech support has to go through Syteline and they have been unable to help so far.

[Rifleman @ Layman's PC]

I've seen similar problems on alot of proprietary software packages. The fix is to turn delayed write cacheing off in windows on all machines. What has happened and returned similar results for me was instead of windows on the server not making a disk write from computer A and instead cacheing it. Computer B tries to make access and a error is generated. These errors can result in memory or hard drive errors. Dunno if that's it, but I've seen it alot and that's the first thing that came to my mind.

[CeeBee]

I've seen similar problems on alot of proprietary software packages. The fix is to turn delayed write cacheing off in windows on all machines. What has happened and returned similar results for me was instead of windows on the server not making a disk write from computer A and instead cacheing it. Computer B tries to make access and a error is generated. These errors can result in memory or hard drive errors. Dunno if that's it, but I've seen it alot and that's the first thing that came to my mind.

It's not that. The app is loaded from a Windows server, but that is a R/O access. All temp writes are on the local machine. Even more, the process can only be run by a single user (access locked by the UNIX database).

[RejectionMan]

how is your VM configured?

strangly enough applications like AUTOCAD, and ADOBE give that kind of error when the VM is dissabled, or les than 1.5 X acctual Mem. typicaly this heppens in systme with less than 128 MB ram..

try reconfiguring VM to 2x actual mem.

[CeeBee]

Plenty of memory, page file can go up to 1.5G
But it works on systems that have 64M of RAM with 400M page file and it can fail sometimes on a system with 1G of RAM and 2G page. That is really disturbing... Watching the memory, hard drive and network usage it appears that the requirement is quite small (process takes about the same amount of time on a 2GHz P4 and on a 200MHz Pentium, seems to be somehow limited by background transactions in the UNIX database). The only thing that can be blamed is network connectivity, but the switches have no errors logged during that time... really confusing!