Dear Lee,

I have just started developing a website in DNN4 and one of our team member is concerned about the crashing module. We are going to have a huge corporate website with lots and lots of portals and subportals.

My question is what will be the impact if one of the modules crahes within your DNN website? Are there ways to reduce/minimize this problem? what is the best solution?

Thanks and regards.

Hello,

If you look at the programming of a DNN module, they have catches put in so that if something goes wrong, it will be logged and should not cause the entire site to crash.

So if a module has problems, it should be just the page that the module is installed on that will not display correctly, the rest of the site should carry on working correctly. - Of course there can be acceptions to this if the module has a serious error.

If you are installing a third party module, make sure you have fully tested it in a localhost environment before using it in a live site.

Check your site logs for errors in the localhost installation and make sure the module does not cause any problems with modules you already have installed on your portal.

Check that the cpu is not running at 100% after installing the module - if it is, there is problems with the module.

Keep a daily backup of your livesite incase something goes wrong with a module. - If an error occurs you can restore a recent backup and have the site up and running again in a matter of minutes.

Basically test, test , test before applying anything to your live site, it's the only way to be 99% sure.

And keep several backups of your site.

Thanks,

Thanks Lee for your quick response as always.

Another question please , Let say I have just one instance of DNN and I have configured the different modules to use on my website, what will happen when I upgrade DNN installation? Do I have to re-configure the modules?

Second what If I have multiple portals/sub portals in a single instance of DNN, all of them with different modules and configuration, now if I want to upgrade DNN, how should  I go about it? and how complex will be the process?

Best Regards

Hello,

Yes this is where it can get slightly more complex.

1) If I have the spare time I'm going to document the process I went through for upgrading DNN Creative recently from 3.2 to 4.4.x as I also had the problem of upgrading modules.

Basically in most cases you will not have to upgrade the modules, but if the DNN upgrade introduces new elements, you may find it breaks the old modules. - Basically you also have to upgrade the modules to the latest versions - when you upgrade them you generally will not have to re-configure them, they should just pick up their old settings.

- Again, test an upgrade using a copy of your live site on a localhost installation to test for any breaking problems

2) Multiple portals with various configurations. - This is related to answer 1, you will have to test the upgrade in a localhost installation to see how the modules react. - The process is the same, but if you have a large variety of different modules, you are more likely to come across problems. - For instance if you have a module that breaks after the upgrade and the module developer no longer supports the module.


When you do a DNN upgrade, I would recommend you upgrade the modules as well, because the module upgrade could be bug fixes for the modules.