Administration

Photon Control

The PhotonControl.exe is a small tray application that manages Photon for you. It runs as separate process and shows as tray icon with right-click menu. A gray icon shows that Photon is not running. When it spots a Photon process running, it turns blue.

You can setup PhotonControl to autorun on login, making it easier to spot Photon on any machine.

The key features are:

• Photon Control reads the license file on start and displays key values.
• Start / Stop Photon as application or install and control it as service instead.
• Install / remove Photon's PerfMon counters, start Windows PerfMon or log counters to a file.
• Explore working path to quickly find the place where Photon is running and where the logs are.

Photon Control needs to be run with Admin rights to install/remove services and the PerfMon Counters.

Running Photon

On a public server, Photon should run as service. This requires only three steps in PhotonControl:

• Install the Photon service
• Install the PerMon Counters (they might prove useful)
• Start Photon as service

The PerfMon Counters are not exactly a requirement to run but they can't be enabled while Photon is running. Using the Dashboard Counters is explained in a separate Chapter.

Running Photon as application is an alternative for local development.

Before you move Photon from one folder to another, you should make sure to remove all services and also PhotonControl autostart. Install again at the new location.

Logs

Photon is logging essential information like its state and exceptions to several log files. There are two "log" folders:

• The deploy/log folder is created after start for application logs. Anything that is logged by your business logic goes into a fitting file in deploy/log.
• The other log folder is where your running executable is (e.g. bin_win32/log). This is where you find logs of Photon's Core.

We used log4net in the logic layer, which can be extensively configured and very useful. Learn more about Log4Net here.

Counters

Photon keeps track of several essential values as support for performance- and error-analysis. These are published in two separate sets of Counters: "PerfMon Counters" and "Dashboard Counters".

PerfMon Counters

The PerfMon Counters are key values from the Photon Core. They track values like connected peers, package count, reliable UDP usage, bandwith and much more. These Counters cannot be changed by the developer and are accessed by PerfMon. Perfmon is a GUI to create those performance graphs and is already installed with Windows.

If PerfMon Counters should be logged over a longer time (and without running the gui), PhotonControl can setup and start logging to a file. Under "PerfMon Counters", click "Create Logging Set" and "Start Logging". The logs should end up under C:\PerfLogs\Admin\photon_perf_log_<date>.blg

Dashboard Counters

The Dashboard Counters track values within the business logic and can be extended as needed.

Dashboard

The Dashboard is a service which aggregates Dashboard Counters and generates graphs on a website to monitor them.

The Dashboard itself can be installed as service while Photon is already running. Which Counter Data an Application publishes (if at all), depends on the Application's setup. Lite has several pre-defined Counters ready to use.

Troubleshooting

If Photon does not behave as expected, always have a look at the logs.

These are the most common pitfalls you should check as well.

• Missing DotNet 3.5: In this case, Photon can't start. Don't mix this up with the CLR Version. The 2.0 CLR version is also used by DotNet 3.5.
• Application missing: If Photon does not find one of the configured applications, it can't start. Check the configuration against deployed folders.
• Build not up to date: Switching to a new server SDK, you should always re-build your applications, referencing the assemblies from the libs folder. Otherwise they might be incompatible.
• Firewall: If Photon is running but not accessible from another machine, check the Firewalls. Newer Windows versions have roles and rights and your hoster most likely used hardware firewalls.
• Lag: By default, the roundtrip time is about 50ms, even locally. This depends on a setting, explained on the setup page. Read: Send Delay and Ack Delay

Dump File Setup

If a server crashes and the reason for it is not found in the logs, Photon can be configured to create dump files. These reflect the state and memory of the crash and are valuable to debug these cases.

To enable the feature, you need to edit your PhotonServer.config. Set the instance-attribute "ProduceDumps" to true and restart the server. It might look like this example:

    
	    <Instance1
		    EnablePerformanceCounters = "true"
		    DataSendingDelayMilliseconds="50"
		    AckSendingDelayMilliseconds="50"
		    MinimumTimeout="5000"
		    MaximumTimeout="30000"
			ProduceDumps="true">
    

This will write up to 10 "full" dump files. Once a dump file is written, you can zip it with the logs and mail it to us with a description of the issue. In most cases, we will get in touch with you to get more information and solve the case.