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Issues with background run mode in BP 6.10.5

Hi all,

I've hit a bit of a road block with the background run mode and executing multiple processes at the same time.

For some background, this initial part of the process grabs emails (via MS Graph), download attached PDFs and sends them to Abbyy FlexiCapture for OCR.

This is initial part is split out across two different processes as the FlexiCapture part is a hybrid between what we call a "collector" and "executor". They have been built in a way that allows us to run them both at the same time across multiple digital workers which has been achieved using environment locks and work queues (PDF data is stored in the work queue itself along with the email object returned from MS Graph).

This works fine most of the time, however I'm seeing a number of exceptions every now and again to do with one of our shared environment variables:

"ERROR: Internal : Environment variable not defined".

I've confirmed that the EV definately exists, and its certainly not removed at execution time as this EV forms part of our downtime process and is used across all of our other processes built in Blue Prism (simple true/false flag, decision at the start of the process that ends the process if this is set to true).

Has anyone had issues before like this and able to offer any advice?

We have requested an upgrade to 6.10.6 to resolve a large number of issues that we have had since updgrading to 6.10.5.

Regards,



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Jordan Harvey

Norfolk County Council
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3 REPLIES 3

John__Carter
Staff
Staff

I suggest raising a ticket Jordan and the Support team are likely to ask about your database and how big the tables are. I'm wondering if at runtime there is some sort of difficulty (eg a time out) in fetching the EV, and this is falsely reported as 'not defined'. An occasional dip in performance, perhaps due to a spike in activity, might explain the randomness you've seen.



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John Carter
Blue Prism
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Hi @jordan.harvey.norfolkcc,
We are facing very same issue, did you manage to find the root cause and solution?
Could you please share the fix or the work around applied. Thanks

Hi @Rafeeq__Mohammad 

The issue happens if you have multiple processes accessing / using the same "global objects". I will share the product team's response below:

"They have advised that there are no specific code stage restrictions when dealing with the run modes of processes or object. Having said that they did advise that you need to ensure that any custom code stages aren't trying to concurrently interact with some global object. To do this without implementing some sort of arbitration/locking could result in issues. Note it is the responsibility of the customer to ensure that their own custom code is safe to execute concurrently. "

I did get clarification on what "global objects" were:

"for Global Object all we're really meaning is an object in Blue Prism that's available for use across multiple processes in that environment, so something where there's that risk, or needs to be consideration of whether there could be a clash with more than one process interacting."

I must admit though, after this I've given up trying to run multiple processes that interact with the same objects at the same time as it became clear to me background run modes were fairly restrictive. For what its worth we still have the same problems on 6.10.6 and are looking to upgrade to 7.3 over the coming weeks.