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  • Jackie 1 post 71 karma points
    Aug 16, 2019 @ 23:24
    Jackie
    0

    We are experiencing "missing content" from published pages

    This began a few weeks ago. Some of our microsites' content just disappeared from one to five of its pages. Not the nodes, just the content. And it is random.

    Our Umbraco reseller can't figure it out---they are blaming it on user error.

    Any ideas?

    Our reseller can retrieve some of the lost content but not all.

    I am wondering about load balancing and caching problems.

    Thanks.

  • Marc Goodson 2123 posts 14214 karma points MVP 8x c-trib
    Aug 17, 2019 @ 08:39
    Marc Goodson
    0

    Hi Jackie

    When you save an item in the Umbraco Backoffice a version of the content is saved to the database. Updates to the content, create a new version in the database. If you right click an item and access the action menu and choose the Rollback option, you can see a list of all the versions of the content item and when it has been updated and by whom. So you shouldn't have 'lost' any content and the Rollback can be used to see if anything strange has happened to make outdated content the 'latest version' (unlikely)

    When you publish a content item, it's published details are stored in the Umbraco Published Cache, this is an XML structure stored in server memory and additionally in an xml file on disk, ... when a server recycles and loses it's memory, it reads the published content details back into memory from the XML file on disk.

    If the file on disk hasn't been updated (eg incorrect file permissions prevent it from being updated) then content will appear to have been published, but the next server app pool recycle, will read the published cache details from the outdated file, and you can appear to immediately lose content! - republishing the missing items would add them back into the memory version of cache but a further app pool recycle would lose them again. It's the commonest cause of published content suddenly going missing!

    With regard to Load Balancing - this will depend a little on how this has been setup, (There is a Load Balancing health check that can help troubleshoot whether configuration is correct)

    https://our.umbraco.com/packages/backoffice-extensions/load-balancing-health-check/

    If LB is not configured correctly then a publish from the backoffice Umbraco instance (one server should be dedicated for editing content) should tell each other server in the Load Balancing pool that an update has been made - There are two flavours of Umbraco load balancing, one is achieved via webservice requests to the other instances, and another is via a database table of cache instructions. In both these flavours, if one of the servers doesn't receive or read the instruction to update it's in memory published cache, then if your web requests hits that server, then you would appear to have 'lost content' but further refreshes (or different browsers/devices) would bring it back.

    Is your Umbraco reseller an Umbraco Gold Partner? this sounds like something it would be relatively straightforward to get to the bottom of!

    regards

    Marc

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