This section identifies the changes and enhancements that have been made in the 8.1.1.1 release of BMC Atrium Discovery and Dependency Mapping (BMC Atrium Discovery).

This hot-fix only includes the Windows discovery slave installers. Download the installers from this location: ftp://ftp.bmc.com/pub/ADDM/hotfixes/8.1.1.1

BMC Atrium Discovery version 8.1.1.1 is a hot-fix that provides the following enhancements:

Improvements to the stability of the Windows discovery slave.

It has been observed that the Windows discovery slave process can leak handles over time. The ultimate outcome of this leak can be that the slave fails to spawn the sub-processes that are a part of the discovery process.

The user visible symptoms of this failure can be:

• Failure to fully discover or update a Windows Host.
• The following error being observed in the Windows discovery slave debug logs
  
  Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "discovery\slave\wmi\engine.pyo", line 340, in runScript
  File "common\process.pyo", line 242, in execute
  File "common\twsubprocessext.pyo", line 71, in communicate
  File "subprocess.pyo", line 885, in _communicate
  IOError: [Errno 22] Invalid argument

To minimize the impact of this leak the Windows discovery slave has been updated to have a single Manager process that controls one or more Worker processes. The Manager ensures that a Worker process performs a maximum of 1000 discovery requests after which the Worker processes is terminated and a new worker process started if needed.

Changes to Windows slave debug log files

With this release there is a change to the way that the Windows discovery slave writes its debug log files. Previously a single process wrote information to a log file, tw_svc_discoslave.log. This log is now used by the new Manager process.

Now that multiple worker processes may be active at any one time, each writes to its own debug log file which is created when the worker starts. The worker log files are called:

discoslave_worker_PID.log where PID is the process identifier for the worker.

Where a new worker has the same PID as an earlier instance of a worker, the new process appends the log to the existing file.

Windows Desktop heap size

It has been observed that when the Windows discovery slave is under load it can reach the size limit imposed by the operating system on the non-interactive session desktop heap.

During load testing of the 8.1.1.1 release it was noticed that the Traceback error listed above could still occur if the non-interactive desktop heap size was 512 kilobytes; when the non-interactive desktop heap size was increased to 1024 kilobytes this error was no longer triggered.

The following Microsoft support article discusses the issue in more detail. It includes a description of Windows system event log messages that are logged when a desktop heap is exhausted and instructions on how to update the registry key to increase the heap size of non-interactive sessions.