FogBugz On Premises: Known Issues Causing Slow Performance

Overview

This article provides a list of known issues that can slow down your FogBugz installation, decrease its performance, and affect your overall experience.

• Filters Loading Slowly
  
• Email Server Issues
  
• Database Authentication
  
• DNS Issues
  
• Database Time-Outs with SQL Server
  
• Database Time-Outs with MySQL
  
• SQL Server Transaction Logs
  
• Virus Scanner
  
• ElasticSearch

Back to top

Environment

Back to top

Information

Filters Loading Slowly

Environment

FogBugz for Your Server versions 8.8.55 and below

Resolution

Navigate to Admin menu > Plugins. If the relative time plugin is enabled, disable it. Check if your filter load time improves.

Back to top

Email Server Issues

Environment

FogBugz/Manuscript version 8.15 and above

Incorrect IIS and SSL Settings

If the SSL is not set correctly, the heartbeat service stops working. This prevents emails from coming into cases. Keep in mind that FogBugz On Premises SSL cannot be configured as a traditional website.

To resolve this issue, please refer to this article on Configuring SSL on FogBugz On Site / On Premises to Use HTTPS.

SMTP Server Issue

If the issue only occurs when automatic email notifications are sent, the problem might be related to your SMTP mail server. For example, if there is a delay when assigning a bug to a person with the email notification turned on compared to a person with the email notification turned off, the issue is probably due to the SMTP server. 

To troubleshoot this issue, use nslookup. If the command takes more than a second to execute and then fails, most probably, there is a connectivity problem between the SMTP machine and the DNS server. Such issues are usually caused by a firewall. Some mail servers attempt to connect to the IDENT port (113) of the mail sender to see from where the mail is coming. If the mail server is outside a firewall and the FogBugz server is inside a firewall, the mail server attempts to connect to port 113 on the FogBugz computer. If the firewall drops these packets, the mail server stalls for around a minute or more before it can deliver the mail. 

To resolve these issues, please review this brief external article on SMTP Server Using IDENT for Authentication.

Back to top

Database Authentication

If the slow performance issue occurs for all page loads, the problem might be caused by an authentication problem. In Windows, if your connection string has Integrated Security=SSPI;..., switch to a name and password in the connection string by using an SQL Server login that has db_owner rights and access to the FogBugz database.

Please see the example below. 
 

Server=myServer;Initial Catalog=myDatabase;User Id=myUserID;Password=myPassword;MultipleActiveResultSets=true;

Back to top

DNS Issues

You might have pages loading slowly, when you are not using Windows Integrated Security, and you are passing a username and password for a database login. If this is the case, the following actions might solve your issue.

• In the connection string, replace the server name part with the IP address.
  Data Source=<SERVER-NAME-HERE>; 
• If the database is on the same machine as the webserver, use Data Source=[localhost];. 
  
• If you are using FogBugz 7.0 or later, and your connection string starts with Driver={MySQL ODBC 3.51 Driver};, change it to start with DRIVER={mysql};. 

Back to top

Database Time-Outs with SQL Server

If you use SQL Server with FogBugz, and you are having performance issues, as a first step, restart the SQL Server. After the restart, if the following entry comes up in the Event Viewer, get the latest SQL Server service pack.

supersocket info: connectionlisten(shared-memory LPC)) error 5

Microsoft SQL Express - Pushing the Envelope

The SQL version that is running FogBugz can also be an issue. If you are using Microsoft SQL Express, make sure that you are not overusing the application. Please review the current limitations of the SQL Server Express. Note that Microsoft SQL Express allows very limited resources, which might not be enough if you have been running the installation for a long time.

Microsoft SQL Express resources:

• The maximum memory used by the SQL Server Database Engine is 1GB.
• The maximum size of each relational database is 10GB.
• SQL Agent is not included in Express. This eliminates the automation of housekeeping in the database.
• The limit on the buffer cache for each instance is 1MB of RAM.
• It is constrained to a single CPU. However, in 2012, this limitation has been changed to "the lesser of one socket or four cores." So, multi-threading is possible.

Microsoft SQL - Performance Degraded or Time-Outs

When you have been running your FogBugz installation for a long time, all of a sudden, you might start to experience the following issues.

• Slowness in accessing cases
• 500 Internal Server Error for API
• Time-outs when trying to open some of the cases

To resolve these issues, rebuild your FogBugz table indexes. Please refer to this article on Rebuilding FogBugz On Premises (Database) Table Indexes.

Back to top

Database Time-Outs with MySQL

Environment

FogBugz for Your Server version 8.8.55 and below

Information

If you use MySQL with FogBugz and you see errors about database time-outs, enable the Slow Query Log in MySQL and proceed to debug.

Back to top

SQL Server Transaction Logs

The transaction log in a database is an integral part of SQL Server. Every database has a transaction log, including FogBugz. The transaction log is stored within the log file but separate from the data file. A transaction log basically records all database modifications throughout the entire life of the (FogBugz) database.

While having a decent amount of log is highly recommended, the transaction log files can grow beyond a reasonable size, and the available disk space in the SQL Server can be severely compromised.

To solve this issue, please refer to this article on Shrinking SQL Server Transaction Logs.
 

Back to top

Virus Scanner

The antivirus scan may be monitoring all files, which might decrease performance drastically. The reason for this issue is that every time the SQL server hits the disk, the antivirus checks the database files for viruses.

To resolve this issue, first, update your antivirus to the latest version. Then, have your antivirus software ignore or whitelist the database files.

Back to top

ElasticSearch

Most issues related to search and case indexing can be solved by resetting and rebuilding the ElasticSearch indexes. To learn more about how to perform this, please refer to this article on Resetting Indexer Backfill to Fix ElasticSearch (ES) Issues.

Back to top