Documentum admin tip: Stubborn jobs

From time-to-time, you may find that dm_jobs fail to run according to their schedule. Sometimes they can be “encouraged” to run by logging in to Documentum Administrator, opening the properties for the job, changing the next invocation date to a time shortly after the present, and saving the changes by clicking OK. Or you can simply open the object, select “Run After Update” and click OK.

When those attempts fail, and assuming you’ve already checked $DM_HOME/tomcat/logs/catalina.out and $DOCUMENTUM/dba/log/<docbase_name>.log for obvious error messages, your agent_exec process might be hung. If none of the jobs are running when they are supposed to this is another indicator of a hung agent_exec process.

One way to clear this problem is to simply kill the agent_exec process. On UNIX you would grep for the process (ps -ef|grep agent_exec ought to do the trick) and then kill it (kill <process id>). The content server will notice that the agent exec process is dead and will start a new one. This should free up those stuck jobs.