Hello all -
My site is running DNN 6.2.4
www.yandasmusic.com
About a month ago, I got a call from my hosting provider informing me that my website was taking up massive amounts of CPU power and RAM, and that it was crashing their servers. They were forced to take my site offline.
After loading the site up on a temp installation, we were able to find the culprit of the massive resource consumption. The DNN Scheduler.
The Search Engine Scheduler event, which is a default scheduled event in DNN, was running at 30 minute intervals. However, when I viewed the schedule history, it showed that the process was taking over 120 hours to complete. As such, this scheduled event was overlapping, and crashing the server.
We disabled the event from the scheduler, and the site returned to a working state. I did some research on the Search Engine Scheduler event, and it seems that the event indexes the module content on my site for use with the dnn search provider.
No where on my site do I use or provide the dnn search functionality. We are an e-commerce store primarily running Smith Cart, and they have search functionality built into their module. However, since disabling the scheduler, I have noticed a few errors in my event viewer that happen from 3-10 times a day.
Module Load Exception
DotNetNuke.Services.Exceptions.ModuleLoadException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.
General Exception
System.NullReferenceException: Object reference not set to an instance of an object. at DotNetNuke.UI.Skins.Skin.InjectModule(Pane pane, ModuleInfo module)
Normally, I wouldn't think twice about a few errors, as long as the site was functioning normally. However, after a day or two, the final submit button on my Smith Cart checkout started producing it's own "Object reference not set to an instance of an object" error, and completely disabled checkout on the entire site.
We rolled back to a version of the site that had not yet had the "server blowup" event happen to it, disabled the scheduled dnn search event, and pushed that live. We're running on 4 days of having a functional checkout on our website, but the fact that the object reference errors are still occurring on modules and pages makes me very nervous.
My question is:
How important is Search Engine scheduled event to DNN functionality? Is it ok to leave it disabled? Do you think there is any correlation between that scheduled event, and the errors being logged in my site? If not, any idea what might be causing the errors?
Thanks!
Alex