RAID Admin reality check -- this software needs serious work

Question

Folks: This is a combination rant about RAID Admin 1.5 (on OSX 10.3.9) and plea for any suggestions for things I may have missed.
RAID Admin -- an utterly crucial tool for responsibly administering an X Serve RAID, itself offered for use in mission critical applications. But RAID Admin is just one frustration after another.
1. Can't start due to broken Java or somesuch. As reported by several others elsewhere, and experienced herre, some QT upgrade breaks ability to launch RA. Thee's a "solution" of rolling back QT -- doesn't work. There's a command-line workaround for launching, but if this is really broken Java, how can you trust other functions of RA? Anyhow, we're running it from console of X Server with non-recent-QT.
2. Finding the RAID Array is totally hit or miss. (And BTW -- don't get hosed by the little feature that it's not sufficient to have the RAID hooked up by fiber... you also have to have the ethernet cables connected). Sometines RA finds the nearby RAIDs by itself, sometimes it finds one of two, sometimes none... figure on entering the IP addresses by hand.
3. Serious memory leak. Leave RA running for a few hours and it ***** up >100% CPU (on dual G4), huge amount of memory, and is almost completely unresponsive (apparently due to huge disk activity to swap virtual memory). Example: after 12 hours uses 372 Meg of real memory and 1.3 G of VM. Quit and restart fixes the problem... but do you really want to do that in midst of lengthy admin operation?
4. Array Conditioning: Seems like a great idea -- but how can you tell whether it's doing anything useful? It generates errors to the event window showing bad blocks.... OK great... what do they mean? Is it fixing them? Where is its output? Maybe we could learn that from the docs....
5. Oh right... no docs. Still stuck on RA 1.2 docs. No mention of Array Conditioning found anywhere in Help, or at apple.com... except to advertise that the feature exists.
Graham

Answer 1

William, thanks for your response, comments inline below:
I have not personally experienced any of the first 3
issues you note. And I've run RAID Admin on 30-40
different systems, and monitored 100+ RAIDs, over the
past 3 years.
... it is good to hear a general level of satisfaction...
Are you experiencing this on just one system --
have you ever tried another machine?
What do you mean? We have one X Serve, and one RAID, and that's the one we need to admin. How would we introduce another machine into the scenario?
I'd suggest that your Java installation has
serious issues.
Why would you suggest that? As I noted, the Java-suspected issue was not on the machine that I reported the rest of the problems on. It simple obliges us not to use RAID Admin remotely (and conveniently) since all the remote machines are up to date with updates including QT.
Also note, it's impossible for RAID Admin to have a
leak. Java has a garbage collector. Therefore, if
there's a leak, it's a JVM problem, and not a RAID
Admin problem.
That line of argument would be correct if the leak was due to orphaned objects -- ie: objects no longer refered to and not garbage collected. There's nothing to stop a program in whatever language just consuming more and more memory because the programmer neglected to throw away unneeded objects.
However, since posting, the Array Conditioning operation has completed, and I've noticed that the memory eating behavior has stopped. I've posted a correction on this.
For #4 and #5, I'd suggest reading the Kbase article
which details the updates and what they're good for:
http://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=302780
Where on that page are you seeing info that addresses 4 and 5? This is in fact the one page I was refering to: it advertises the feature, but where are the docs?
I'd suggest you figure out what's wrong
with your Java installation.
No reason to suspect Java on the server, where we are running RAID Admin.
I posted some command-line options which will
give diagnostic output in other threads,
... that could be useful, could you be more specific about where you posted them, and do they cover the result of Array Conditioning?
Thanks again for your answers,
Graham