Resolving Siebel CRM Performance Issues: Understanding the Impact of Orphaned Sessions and Message Broadcast

Recently, a critical issue was identified in the Siebel CRM production environment where the application would intermittently hang or crash. After thorough investigation, it was discovered that the AOM (Application Object Manager) tasks had maxed out, causing the crashes. This issue repeated multiple times across several instances, impacting performance and user experience.

Initially, the root cause seemed to be the increased number of users accessing the system over the past few years. However, a deeper dive into the issue revealed additional factors contributing to this sudden change. Specifically, it was observed that user sessions could remain active when users closed their browsers without logging out of the Siebel application. These "orphaned" sessions would typically be terminated once they reached the idle timeout. However, under certain conditions, this idle timeout mechanism was not working as expected.

One of the key factors leading to this was the Siebel Message Broadcast feature. The Message Broadcast allows administrators to send real-time messages to users, but when this feature is enabled, it can unintentionally prevent idle sessions from being terminated. If the Message Broadcast Interval is set to a value shorter than the idle timeout, the broadcast essentially resets the session activity, keeping it alive indefinitely. As a result, these orphaned sessions never reach the idle timeout and continue consuming system resources, leading to the maxing out of AOM tasks.

How to Address the Issue:

1. Disable Message Broadcast: If the broadcast feature is not essential to your daily operations, consider disabling it altogether. This will allow the idle timeout mechanism to function normally and terminate inactive sessions.

2. Increase Message Broadcast Interval: If the Message Broadcast feature is necessary, ensure that the interval between messages is longer than the application's idle timeout value. This way, idle sessions will be properly terminated before another broadcast refreshes the session.

By implementing either of these two changes, you can prevent orphaned sessions from accumulating, ensuring better performance and avoiding future system crashes or hangs.

This situation underscores the importance of monitoring and fine-tuning session management settings in Siebel CRM environments. As user bases grow and system configurations evolve, regular performance audits can help prevent unexpected issues like this from arising.

Reference: https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E14004_01/books/AppsAdmin/AppsAdminMessageBroad5.html

Siebel Issue in Product export: 

Error: Too many records that could be returned (SBL-DAT-00500)

While exporting products from Dev environment, you might get below error in a newly setup environment.

Error details:

The' NextRecord' method of Business Component' Object Rule Nodes ImpExp BC' (Integration Component' Object Rule Nodes ImpExp BC') returned the following error:
"Too many records that could be returned . Refine your query so that fewer rows are retrieved.(SBL-DAT-00500)

Root cause:

The DSMaxFetchArraySize and MaxCursorSize are not sufficient for the number of records to be exported

Solution:

• Navigate to : Site map -> Administration - Server configuration -> Enterprise -> Profile configuration
• In Enterprise Profiles Search for ServerDataSrc in the Alias column.
• In the lower applet (Profile Parameters) click on the "Advanced" tab and search for DSMaxFetchArraySize in the Alias column.
• Change the value to -1 from 0
• Then restart the server.

Hope this helps...⏩