Deployed binaries getting locked during SDL Tridion 2011 SP1 publishing

Question

I have the following scenario:

I publish a page which contains multiple binaries which is then received by an HTTP Receiver and Deployed using an in-process Deployer all hosted in IIS in a dedicated application pool running as the Local Service user.

The Page is stored in the Broker Database, and the binaries are published to the local file system using a path like "D:\Binaries\Preview".

The preview folder is shared to a domain user as a read only share at something like \machinename\PreviewBinaries so that the binaries can be displayed using the web application.

Nine time out of ten everything works fine, but occasionally publishing fails, and it seems to be because the binaries can not be overwritten due to them being locked by another process. I have used ProcessMon and other tools to try and establish what might be locking these files (to no avail). Sometimes I can manually delete the images, and then publishing works again. If I restart IIS on the server I can always delete the files and publish.

Does anyone have any suggestions on what processes could be locking these images? Has anyone seen this issue before? Could there be any issues that I am publishing to a share? Or could SiteEdit 2009 possibly be locking these files as it only seems to occur on our preview server and live (no SiteEdit) seems fine.

Thanks in advance

Answer 1

OK, well it seems the offending code was in the Presentation Framework we are using. The framework used Response.TransmitFile(binaryPath) to asynchronously transmit the binaries to the clients. It seems that this puts a temporary lock handle on the binaries (even when they are on a read only share).

We have removed this line of code, and modified the application to server binaries in another way (we now rewrite the path so that IIS can transmit the files directly). This seems to have solved the issue, and improved site performance.

Thanks for all your suggestions, it helped me rule out all the things that were not causing the issue, so I was able to find the root cause.

Answer 2

If you're on Windows 2008, you can try and delete the file from disk. It will then tell you what process has locked the file. But given that restarting IIS unlocks the file, it seems quite likely that it is IIS that keeps a lock on them.

I don't see how SiteEdit 2009 could cause a lock on these files. Given that you can have your preview server on another box, SiteEdit only talks to that server through HTTP. It never accesses the files on the preview server directly and not even through a CD API. Just regular requests to your web server, just like a visitor would.

Answer 3

I see you have used Process Monitor, but have you tried Sysinternals Process Explorer? "Find->Find Handle or Dll" is pretty useful for this kind of thing. Or if you prefer a command line tool, Sysinternals aslo make handle.exe, which dumps everything out for you.

Answer 4

Are there any Anti-virus or indexing services running. These tend to take very short-lived locks at just the moment you don't want them to. Particularly with Anti-virus, this is typically just as one process relinquishes its lock and just before your other process tries to take one. If this is the issue, then setting up some exclusion directories should help.

Answer 5

Again, not a direct answer but I wanted to share this anyway:

I've seen a similar situation where I published Pages to the Broker Database and Binaries to the file system. When I changed the Identity of the Application Pool to Network Service this problem disappeared, and I haven't looked into it further.