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WRE for Windows

Albeit not the recommended platform (see System Requirements), Windows can successfully run the WRE. See Installing WRE 0.8.3 for details about how to setup WRE along with potential problems.

WRE Tweaks

Since the WRE is built primarily for *nix systems, there are some config files that require modifications. I've found that Windows will assume the c:\ drive if no drive is specified. However, I don't like to rely on default behavior. Here are the files we've had to edit in the wre folder:

  • etc\modperl.conf
    • set WebguiRoot path
    • for custom libraries, add "PerlSwitches -Ic:/data/site/lib" (or wherever your libraries are)
    • optional (see below), add "PerlRequire c:\data\WebGUI\sbin\preload.perl"
  • WebGUI\sbin\preload.perl -
    • set $webguiRoot in BEGIN block
    • adding the PerlRequire above was causing Apache to segfault when it started. I edited it to comment out everything but the BEGIN block so that I could enable the custom library locations. The segfault had something to do with 'use WebGUI()' I think. The error was - "Faulting application Apache.exe, version 2.0.59.200, faulting module msvcrt.dll, version 7.0.2600.2180, fault address 0x00036fa3"

Performance Tuning

There are a few tweaks to Windows that will help you get the maximum performance from this OS. The following suggestions are based on "Improving Windows XP Performance"

  1. Disable unnecessary services such as Fax Service, MSN Explorer, etc. via Control Panel
  2. Disable Indexing Service on the disks -- open Drive Properties and uncheck the box at the bottom of the General tab
  3. Disable Automatic Updates -- you should manually do the checks
  4. Turn off Visual Effects and set Processor Scheduling to adjust for best performance of Background services (My Computer -> System Properties -> Advanced)

Trouble-Shooting

Perl58.dll Application Errors

We've been seeing these errors occassionally on 2 separate servers both running WindowsXP workstation and WRE 0.8.x with WebGUI 7.4.x. Not sure the case and so far there have been no fatal data losses. Possible solutions: use a server version of Windows, upgrade to the latest version of Apache which addresses some mod_perl on Windows issues.

Keywords: windows wre