Primary On-Prem MA - Windows based and crashing processes on MA

I had a very similar case recently. Do you happen to have the additional key on your MAs?

sPipelineMode (value=SR:P;R:P)

​@dude Do you happen to have information what this setting actually changes and why you have it in place. I was wondering about it as it came forward in another post some years ago in where I also asked for details but I never received an answer. It also doesn't popup in the updated additional settings database lookup page.

​@Onno van den Berg I initially had it in place due to performance issues related to Tape Copies which never really solved the problem and we end up finding other things that were causing the issues.

This setting more recently was actually crashing CVD/CVODS on our MAs, there is the reason I was asking.

From Tier 2 support regarding sPipeLineMode;

 "The sPipelineMode Mode key overrides the SDT transfer method which will prevent quit flags from being properly called at the end of a stream or when a stream fails. This results in a hung process which leads to the affected process (in this case CVD and CVODS) to fail out and crash, leaving behind the zombie thread which never quit. By disabling sPipelineMode key and reverting to SDT pipelines, this condition will be avoided"

Ahh ok. So, this setting was still in place while it should have been removed as it didn't make any difference in terms of performance. 

Thank you all for your reply. 

​@Pradeep Thank you for the reminder about the error reporting. Support had me configure this back in October 2024, but nothing was populated at that time. With your reminder, I checked again and found that a DMP file was finally generated in January 2025 for the vsbk process. I reviewed the DMP file, and it appears to be benign and unrelated to the random exe crashes on the MA.

​@dude I checked my MA properties Additional Settings and i do not have that entry. However I do have:
nClientGrpMaxCPUPercent iDataAgent 50      

nClusterMount   Virtual Server 1

nIscsiEnable iDataAgent 1

nRescanAllHBA Virtual Server BOOLEAN true

sSNAP_IsISCSI iDataAgent STRING Y

Again, thank you for all of your insights. Maybe things will be better on new hardware and after the environment is upgraded out of 11.28. The server is strong and performing better than ever. I was just looking to tidy up.