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Upgrading taking a long time

Jonny Polivka

Upgrading from 7.4.11 to 7.13.2 and the installer gets to the state...

"Configuring Confluence - Please wait a few moments while we configure Confluence"

...and stays there. This last attempt I left it running for 90 minutes but the progress bar doesn't update. Task manager shows the process is using CPU between 0 - 10% so it seems that it's not really hung. (Or is some thread inside the installer is?)

The service is not running and the database is hosted on a separate server.

Questions:

Does the installer generate a log file when ran? If so location and name?
What is the installer doing at this state?
Is there a way to know what exactly it's doing?

Environment

- Windows 2021 R2 x64 (4 cpu / 16GB ram)

- Confluence Server 7.4.11

- DB hosted on SQL Server

Thank you

Accepted answers

Florian Schüller_0hnhyg

Hi @Jonny Polivka

after dealing with the topic intensively several times and being in contact with Atlassian Support multiple times, I have now found the cause of why the Confluence Windows installer takes a very long time to complete the setup.

While analyzing our XDR logs I discovered that the Confluence installer calls the Windows tool icacls.exe and modifies/adjusts all files in the data directory (Confluence Home).
Since there are a large number of attachments in the data directory, this process takes a lot of time. It is unclear to me why the installer performs these operations, especially since these changes are not made when performing an update using the .zip archive method.

There is now the following feature request: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFSERVER-98750

I hope this information helps you a little.
Please let me know if you observe the same behavior on your end.

Best regards from vienna,
Florian

All comments

Brant Schroeder

@Jonny Polivka

I have seen this happen in the past when the application server did not have enough memory. I have also seen it when the DB server does not have enough CPU. What is happing on your DB server when this is going on, is the CPU tapped?

Jonny Polivka

Our app server is 4 CPUs / 16 GB RAM. I was watching Task Manager and memory was around 3GB the whole time the installer was running.

Unknown on the sql server. Will ask our DBA group...but does the installer communicate with the DB? I didn't see or notice a lot of network activity viewing via Tack Manager.

Brant Schroeder

@Jonny Polivka at the end of the install all the db updates take place. Did you check all you apps to make sure they are compatible? Sometimes it will get hung on apps that can not upgrade.

Jonny Polivka

Hi @Brant Schroeder

I did run the Confluence Update Checker before and disabled two apps that it flagged; Atlassian Rest API Browser and SSO for Atlassian Data Center.

Did some digging on the test environment and found a few i4j_nlog_*.log files in my user AppData\Local\Temp directory that look to have relevant data. With those clues I get to ej technologies product install4J, "multi-platform Java installer builder."

Moving back to the test instance, I ran the 7.13.2 installer again and saw that it created and started logging to file i4j_log_Confluence_<random number>.log file. So that answers my question if the installer creates a log file.

Comparing that log file with the existing ones they don't quite match up so they look to be logging two different events triggered by the installer. (This is just a guess.)

I rolled back production instance so there is no way for me to check for this file.

Florian Schüller_0hnhyg

Hello @Jonny Polivka ,

is there possibly an XDR (Extended Detection and Response) agent or something similar running on the application server?

I suspect that this could be the reason, as this agent checks all processes and file accesses/modifications to determine if they are legitimate.

Florian Schüller_0hnhyg

Hi @Jonny Polivka

There is now the following feature request: https://jira.atlassian.com/browse/CONFSERVER-98750

I hope this information helps you a little.
Please let me know if you observe the same behavior on your end.

Best regards from vienna,
Florian

Jonny Polivka

Thanks @Florian Schüller for this interesting detail. Just voted on the feature request. Hopefully it will gain traction.

My co-work perform an upgrade to 9.2.5 in late June and the lengthy pause was observed. We've never used the .zip archive but it is interesting that upgrading from that doesn't trigger the call to icacls.exe.

Next upgrade we'll check out icacls.exe usage.

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