We have a facility for staff that allows them to download an Excel marking scheme, enter student marks and then to upload it as a tab delimited file (or xml file) back into the system. Last night a member of staff using the facility crashed both servers in our cluster.

On further inspection (and a lot of development server crashes!) I finally narrowed the problem down to a single line of code

Line Input #fileID, strLine

On further investigation it appears that the user exported their marking scheme from Excel using the ‘Unicode (.txt)’ rather than ‘ Text (.txt)’ and it’s the import of Unicode that was causing Domino to crash. My quick solution to stop the server crash is to use ‘Dos2Unix’ convert the file before importing. Although it seems to alter the format so that it no long imports correctly, it’s stopped the server from crashing.