When working on a SharePoint 2013,
after several hours of uptime, the user interface showed an error message when
our user wanted to save an item in a list : “The server was unable to save the
form at this time. Please try again.”
Looking at different possible
causes, We found that the available memory was drastically low. Indeed, on this
8GB RAM, only few megs were still available.
Then, in the “Processes” tab, We saw
that the noderunner.exe process was eating a lot of memory. So we restarted the
“SharePoint Search Host Controller” service. The service took a long time to
restart and a huge part of the memory was released. The good thing is that at
the same time it solved the item-saving issue. The error disappeared.
To be sure this service restart was
“solving” the issue, We worked again several hours, playing also with the
search and when the VM got short in memory, the same error message was shown
again.
Another side effect of this
low-memory case occurs when browsing the Managed Metadata tree. We suddenly
received constantly an “Unexpected response from server. The status code of
response is ‘500’. The status text of response is
‘System.ServiceModel.ServiceActivationException’. Unfortunately, it was
impossible to get out of this message loop, and the only way to get rid of it
was to kill the Internet Explorer application.
To prevent this low-memory case, we
upgrade our server RAM into 16GB. So we can keep the available memory high. And
we always monitoring our server, so we will release the memory before our
clients get the “The server was unable to save the form at this time. Please
try again.” error.