Sitecore 6.5 Content Delivery Problems (publishing/caching?)

Question

We have a Sitecore 6.5 instance with separate CM and CD servers, each uses it's own core, web and master db's as well.

We are seeing issues when a new version of content is created. The CM Master and Web databases show the correct content in the content editor. After a publish, the Web database on CD shows the correct content in the content editor.

However, the website is showing a mix of correct content and standard values.

Some things I've tried and noticed:

Clearing cache manually as no effect.
No publishing or cache errors in the CD or CM logs
We've reviewed the Scalability Guide to be sure CD and CM are setup correctly
Saving the item in the CD content editor immediately fixes the problem until a new version is created and published on CM
Republishing vs Smart Publish has no affect
The site is correct when viewing the CM version

I'd love to hear anyone's thoughts or questions that might steer me in the right direction.

First of all it sounds strange, that you have a separate master database for the CD environment. Secondly this sounds like an issue with event queues. Have you set that up? — Jens Mikkelsen
Yeah, event queues were one of the first things we checked. They are setup and we can see the publish events in the CM server log. — Jason Booth
@JensMikkelsen, regarding the master database being separate, do you think that could be related? — Jason Booth
No, that shouldn't be related, if you can se the item correctly in the content editor. However you should check what is registered in the Event Queue table in the web database for the CD environment. If serverspecific properties aren't set correctly. — Jens Mikkelsen
Check the time on all of the servers. They MUST be synchronized. — Marek Musielak

Jason Booth Jason Booth · Accepted Answer · 2013-10-24T01:14:25

We finally figured out this issue with some solid help from Sitecore support.

The pages that were "misbehaving" used the Lucene index to locate the Sitecore item and then display information from the item. In our case, the Lucene index was not being updated when the item was published.

Sitecore recommended configuring the HistoryEngine for the web databases on both CD and CM. That fixed the issue.

<Engines.HistoryEngine.Storage>
  <obj type="Sitecore.Data.$(database).$(database)HistoryStorage, Sitecore.Kernel">
   <param connectionStringName="$(id)" />
   <EntryLifeTime>30.00:00:00</EntryLifeTime>
  </obj>
</Engines.HistoryEngine.Storage>
<Engines.HistoryEngine.SaveDotNetCallStack>false</Engines.HistoryEngine.SaveDotNetCallStack>

We still have a couple things we can't explain and Sitecore couldn't either

How was this working for other sites on the same instance in the past? What caused the issue to start now?
Why were the pages displaying some of the items' content? Where was that coming from?

Now that I know the fix, I'll have to dig in some more to see if I can figure out these questions.

Hopefully this steers someone else in the right direction.

Sitecore 6.5 Content Delivery Problems (publishing/caching?)

1 Answers