Server maintenance

There are a few maintenance tasks that you should follow with your Frontier/Manila server.

Compacting root files

As a Frontier object database file, Frontier.root, gets older, freed disk blocks are added to an internal list called the "avail list." As this list gets long, disk-based operations can slow down significantly.

You can periodically freshen your database with the Save A Copy command in the File Menu on a regular basis or when you notice a guest database is quite large (a few hundred MB).

First, shut down the Web server by choosing Web->Web Server->Stop while you compact the root files.

Make sure Frontier.root is the front most window by choosing Window->Frontier.root.

Then choose File->Save A Copy and save Frontier.fresh.root to the Frontier folder. Take a short break. When it's finished, quit Frontier, move Frontier.root to a safe place as a backup. Rename Frontier.fresh.root to Frontier.root. Relaunch Frontier and turn the Web server back on. Things should run faster now.

You can delete the original Frontier.root. The new one contains all the information in the old one. But if you have the drive space, you can just keep the compacted root as a backup.

To compact other root files in the Guest Databases folder, like the config.root file in the apps sub-folder. Follow the same instructions as compacting the Frontier.root file, but first choose Window->config.root.

Other common files that you should compact are aggregatorData.root in the /ops/datafiles/ folder, members.root and discuss.root in the /ops/ folder and any manilaWebsites.root files in the /www/ folder.

Tip

You can use this sample script to compact all open root files in the Guest Databases folder and save them to a sub-folder of the Frontier folder called "Saved Databases". Remember to turn off the Web server when compacting the root files.

You can then exit Frontier and replace the root files in the Guest Databases folders with the compacted root files. It also might be a good idea to make a backup of the existing Guest Databases folder before copying over the compacted root files.

If you want to get an idea of the condition of your object database, enter window.dbStats () into the Quick Script window. A report appears in a separate window. The third line in the stats window tells you how many nodes are on the avail list. The fewer the better.

Save A Copy will also compact the file, squeezing out all the unused space between disk blocks. The resulting file will be smaller than the original file.

Log and backup files

It's recommended that you leave enough free drive space on the drive Frontier is installed.

If you have enabled any of the logging and statistics or nightly backup of guest databases on your server and you have limited hard drive space where Frontier is installed, you may need to delete or move these files periodically.

Log files are by default saved to the Guest Databases\ops\logs folder. And backup of guest databases are saved to Guest Databases\ops\backups.

Backups

You should make periodic backups of your Frontier folder to save your server and Manila site data to another machine or other media. If you want to backup the entire Frontier folder, turn off the Frontier while you copy the contents of the folder.

If you have enabled the option to backup your guest databases nightly in the Frontier Admin site, Frontier will backup the databases in the Guest Databases folder (except for the Data Files sub-folder) to the Guest Databases\ops\backups folder. You can leave Frontier running, while backing up the contents of this folder.

You can also enable the Manila site level backup from the site-level administrative pages, which provides another layer of backups that saves the contents of a Manila site to a different folder. It exports the contents of the Manila site table to individual files for each object in the table. You can either have this happen nightly or just on a one-time basis.

Flipping the Manila Sites Database

Covered in the User's Guide, you should flip the Manila site database file periodically so your sites have room to grow (adding new stories, pictures etc.) before the file reaches the 2GB database size limit.