PRB: Postings and Images Do Not Appear on Live Site After Site Deployment Import

After you have used the Content Management Server (CMS) Site Deployment Manager to perform a site import, you may receive the following error message when you request postings from the CMS server: In some cases, a posting is returned, but the posting contains missing images.

The request for the uncached posting during the import renders that posting unavailable after the import. The CMS memory cache still references the unavailable object, even though the posting is now accessible.

To work around this problem, follow these steps:

1. Open the CMS Server Configuration Application (SCA).
2. On the Cache tab, click Clear Memory Cache.
3. On the Start menu, click Run, and then type net stop aesecurityservice to stop the AESecurity service.

NOTE: This empties the CMS memory cache and disk cache. However, if the disk cache is not cleared, users can delete the disk cache files manually.

To avoid this behavior in the future, make sure that your CMS disk cache and memory cache contain cached versions of the postings and resource gallery objects that may be requested during the site deployment import operation. Postings or resources that are requested during a site deployment import that were not cached before the import begins can remain unavailable after the import is completed.

During the import process of site deployment, as well as during background processing, the CMS server is conducting what is called a long running transaction. During these periods the CMS database becomes locked; neither read nor write access to the database is available until the transaction is completed. This prevents users from making potentially harmful modifications to the CMS server that is being deployed to or that is performing background cleanup. All requests for CMS objects that are made during the import process are directed to the disk cache, as opposed to the database, to retrieve the item. For example, if a user browses to a posting on the CMS server while a .rop file is being imported, that user sees the cached version of the posting. If no cached version exists, the posting is temporarily unavailable until after the import is complete.

In some cases, objects that are requested from the CMS server during a long running transaction that were not cached before the transaction began are not immediately available after the transaction is completed.

The documented best practices dictate that you schedule long running transactions such as site deployment and background processing during the lowest site activity period so as to cause the least amount of inconvenience to the users that access your site.

Note The workaround that is described in this article has been confirmed on a single CMS server on which IIS was not being used by other server products, Web applications, or Internet technologies such as Microsoft Site Server, Microsoft Commerce Server, Microsoft Application Center, or Active Server Pages (ASP) fragment caching.

For additional information, click the article number below to view the article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base: For more information, see Chapter 7 in the NCompass Resolution 4.0 Site Management Guide and Chapter 7 in the CMS 2001 Site Administrator's Guide.