AEM 6.3: Author -> dispatcher flush also executes replication event to publishers | Community
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Level 4
January 16, 2019

AEM 6.3: Author -> dispatcher flush also executes replication event to publishers

  • January 16, 2019
  • 2 replies
  • 9736 views

Let me first describe our 2 agents on our author environment:

- Dispatcher flush agent (we have a dispatcher in front of our author environment to add an extra layer of caching for the content authors)

- Default agent (used for publishing to the publish environment)

NOTE: obviously 2 different entities.

The dispatcher flush agent is new in our setup and gets trigger on modification. After adding the agent our content author complained that their changes were automatically published for some reason. After some investigation/debugging of the com.day.cq.replication.impl.ReplicatorImpl it seems that there is also a replication event fired by the RolloutManager with the following ReplicationOptions (note: no AgentIdFilter or ReplicateOnModification filter)

ReplicationOptions{synchronous=false, revision='null', suppressStatusUpdate=false, suppressVersions=false, filter=null, aggregateHandler=null}

No filter results in all enabled agents to be triggered so the path will get replicated to the publishers, NOT wat we want...

It seems to me the the combination of a dispatcher flush agent and default agent is not working properly. Anyone experiencing the same problems?

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2 replies

Gaurav-Behl
Level 10
January 16, 2019

Since the flush agent is on author, could you validate that the "Triggers" tab of the flush agent doesn't have any checkbox turned on esp. Ignore Default or On Modification?

Are you doing programmatic replication/flushing or any workflow based replication/flushing of the content using ReplicationOptions?

Level 4
January 17, 2019

This is our triggers tab:
And no workflows are doing such a thing in our codebase at the moment. Wouldn't I see our custom class if we had one when debugging?

joerghoh
Adobe Employee
Adobe Employee
January 16, 2019

In any case, the RolloutManager would always fire a replication event if it's configured in that way; it does not depend on the fact if a flush agent is configured or not (or even a combination of standard replication agent and flush agent).

I assume that it's just a coincidence of these 2 activities, and that the flush agent has nothing to do with it. Have you changed your rollout configuration recently to include replication?

Jörg

Level 4
January 17, 2019

I am testing it on a local machine with a default and dispatcher flush agent pointing to our acceptance env. so it would can't be a coincidence because I see it every time and I am the only one testing on my local machine. We have the following rollout configs on our livecopy:

- /etc/msm/rolloutconfigs/pushonmodify
- /etc/msm/rolloutconfigs/activate
- /etc/msm/rolloutconfigs/deactivate

We had the above config from the start of the project and never had any pages publish automatically on edit. We only want the dispatcher flush on edit for now.

Gaurav-Behl
Level 10
January 22, 2019

How have you configured the flush agent to be triggered automatically on modification as you have mentioned in the description? Is it via "On modification" checkbox under "Triggers" tab or something else?

The dispatcher flush agent is the only agent that has the trigger 'On Modification' checked on its triggers tab.

Do you have "On modification" checkbox turned on under "Triggers" tab for default publish agent?

The publish agent has no triggers checked on its triggers tab.

Could you disable both default publish agent and dispatcher flush agent and check the blocked queues for both agents http://localhost:4502/etc/replication/agents.author/flush.html  and http://localhost:4502/etc/replication/agents.author/publish.html

  • Validate the user name that triggers the replication and flush? Is it 'msm-service' or 'replication-service' or some other?
    • NOTE: I have not disabled the agents but just changed their target ip's because disabling resulted in seeing no queued items at all for both of them.
    • Editing a component
      • Dispatcher flush agent
      • Publish agent

    • Publishing the page
      • Dispatcher flush agent
      • Publish agent
  • Validate the sequence of tasks for flush and replication. If pushonmodify rollout/msm triggers that replication, then you should see the user name as 'msm-service'. If its triggered by flush agent, then it would be with user 'replication-service'
    • See answer above, both 'msm-service' and 'replication-service' are listed.

Just to be clear - If you remove/disable the flush/invalidation agent then you do not observe this kind of auto-replication behavior? You could validate same with above mentioned step of checking publish agent queue/logs.

    • Editing a component
      • Dispatcher flush agent
        • No items on queue due to the agent being disabled
      • Publish agent
        • NO item is being added to the queue
    • Publishing a page
      • Dispatcher flush agent
        • No items on queue due to the agent being disabled
      • Publish agent

It seems that when the dispatcher flush agent is disabled I indeed don't see the auto-replication behaviour on modification only when I actually publish the page the corresponding item will be added to the publish agent queue.

Could you remove 'pushonmodify' from live copies and do a manual rollout from source page and check the behavior if automated publish still happens?

When I replace my LiveCopy rollout configuration:

/etc/msm/rolloutconfigs/activate

/etc/msm/rolloutconfigs/deactivate

/etc/msm/rolloutconfigs/pushonmodify

BY:

/etc/msm/rolloutconfigs/activate

/etc/msm/rolloutconfigs/deactivate

/etc/msm/rolloutconfigs/default

And trigger a manual rollout using http://localhost:4502/etc/blueprints.html , the auto-replication behaviour is NOT happening anymore. We benefit a lot from the '/etc/msm/rolloutconfigs/pushonmodify' config, we are aware of the potential negative performance impact.


Editing a component -

pushonmodify rollout pushed the content changes from source to live copies and then generated 'onmodify' event which was captured by flush agent and hence you see two invalidation requests with 'replication-service' triggered by flush agent.

I'm not sure why 'webservice-support-replication' got triggered for the child pages. Here's the explanation & fix for same [1]. Now 'msm-service' publish and invalidation request got triggered from the 'onmodify' trigger that was launched by 'pushonmodify' rollout. I believe this is what you mentioned as the problem statement. I'm not sure if this is a bug or expected functionality.

On publish-

Since admin user triggered the publish hence the first row is fine. In this case 'webservice-support-replication' [1] still got triggered. The rows with 'msm-service' are fine as it was a publish + invalidation request.

[1] - Flush replications are triggered by webservice-support-replication user | AEM 6.x

Per my knowledge, the common listener for publish agent and invalidation agent doesn't distinguish the action to be taken if the filter agent is null (which is the case here for onmodify event). Probably Jörg Hoh can help here..

The stack trace for 'Thread-1349' might be waiting on the agent itself because the queue was blocked.