Duplicates cause crashing

[Guidepost]

Hello,

I know this problem has been discussed before, but the exact problem we are experiencing does not appear to have been covered.

We are on version 9 and have found that when we make changes to SOME duplicate products, Actinic crashes.

The duplicates were set to allow duplicate fields to be modified - I have changed this to NOT allow them to be modified but this does not seem to have helped.

The product reference is 6 characters long - I know this has caused problems if it is too long.

I have been in touch with the support team (we do have cover) and it has been passed to the developers to look at but they have had it for a couple of weeks without result so I wondered if anyone had any ideas?

Thanks,
Rosalyn

[stualk]

That could be down to a number of things and it may not even be Actinic related. How many products do you have in your database? Have you tried compacting the database at all? (Do a backup before you try it)

Also, if you're using v8/v9 and have Actinic Cover then why don't you consider upgrading? Cover customers get upgraded to v10/v11 FOC as far as I'm aware and you may find this solves your problem (and increases the functionality available to you into the bargain)

[Guidepost]

Hi,

Thanks for your reply.

I have tried compacting the database - we have approx 5000 products.

I have also tried upgrading to V11 - we have the same problem so I thought I'd try to fix it before the move to V11.

[stualk]

Interesting. I have a site with three times as many products, many of which are duplicates, and there are no real problems with it at all. How long has this been a problem?

What's the purpose of the duplicate products on your site? You could look at alternative ways to display products in more than section, such as creating variables and categorising products. I've just done a site that does this and it works really well. No need for duplicate products that way.

[Guidepost]

Hi, we've been using Actinic in the same way for years - this problem has cropped up in the past few months.

Thanks

[stualk]

Can you pinpoint exactly when it started to happen? Have you made any customisations to Actinic or installed any add-ons recently? Something must have changed for it to suddenly start doing this. So if you can pinpoint when it started and what changed around that time you could revert back to that point (hopefully you have backups) you might find the problem resolves itself.

It could be worth installing Actinic on another PC and importing an older backup and seeing if you get the same problem. Or you could even import a current backup and see if you get it, because it could be something on your PC hogging resources and causing Actinic to crash.

Have you seen this section of the Actinic Knowledgebase about how to make sure you're setup for optimum performance?

http://community.actinic.com/forumdisplay.php?f=118

[Jan]

It could be that your actinic database has become corrupt, either because of it's size or because of an error in the data that is stored.

I would suggest recreating the products and duplicates that cause problems to see if this corrects the problem and also compacting your databases (housekeeping menu) on a regular basis.

Regards,