Question: Why is my study stuck in the 'Processing' status hours after I deployed it?

Topic: caIntegrator usage

Release: all versions

Date entered: 2/22/2012

Details About the Question

When you deploy a study, you may find its status showing as 'Processing' on the 'Manage Studies' page hours or even days later (see screenshot below with study status highlighted in red). The status may remain stuck like this indefinitely regardless of how fast your caIntegrator server is.

Answer

The most common cause of this problem is an out of memory error caused by a limitation in the size of the heap on the JBoss server running caIntegrator. If a study deployment fails due to this error, caIntegrator does not notify the user and instead logs the error in the server.log file located at the following Windows path:

[installation root]\caintegrator2\jboss-4.0.5.GA\server\default\log

Note that the study's status will continue to show as 'Processing' on the 'Manage Studies' page even after the deployment has failed and the error has been logged.

The heap size is set in the 'run.bat' file located at the following Windows path:

[installation root]\caintegrator2\jboss-4.0.5.GA\bin

By default, the heap size, which is dynamically allocated, is set at a minimum of 256 MB and a maximum of 512 MB, which is not nearly enough when deploying studies with large datasets. For instructions on how to modify the heap size by editing 'run.bat', please refer to the following KB article at:

[insert link here]

The recommended heap size varies greatly depending on the size of your dataset and the amount of available physical memory on your caIntegrator server. For reference, in a dataset containing 500 Affymetrix CEL files that are approximately 16GB in combined size, the minimum heap size required for the study deployment to complete successfully is 15 GB.

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