k.exe file - What is it and what is its purpose?

RE: k.exe file - What is it and what is its purpose?

davel001150 — Mon, 21 Oct 2019 14:07:26 GMT

Honestly, this sounds like the sort of thing that gets installs so corrupted that you may need to shut everything down and start over with a fresh install to get it working again. Save your work before you get too excited with the Task Manager.

RE: k.exe file - What is it and what is its purpose?

Mike Schmitt — Fri, 18 Oct 2019 16:15:05 GMT

[quote userid="3633" url="~/discussions/f/administration/17799/k-exe-file---what-is-it-and-what-is-its-purpose/70045"]As I understand, we should ideally have only one instance of this executable file running at a time[/quote]

I don't believe there is any such implication at all. In short, this is not something you should mess with manually unless you thoroughly understand what's happening under the hood, and/or you're running a local install where you don't care if you mess it up.

RE: k.exe file - What is it and what is its purpose?

davel001150 — Fri, 18 Oct 2019 15:41:52 GMT

I think all engines are run on K, so I have a feeling every instance of K are all needed and you'll drop one or more engines if you turn any of them off.

If you're on a test environment, or if you don't have anything being used by enterprise on your prod environment yet, I suppose you could shut off K files and see what the effect is, provided you're actively monitoring engines and you're willing to accept the risk of adding more work to get it back up.

RE: k.exe file - What is it and what is its purpose?

hiteshd — Fri, 18 Oct 2019 15:31:53 GMT

Thanks for the input, Tim and David.

Next question I have is 'How do we identify which ones are obsolete and can be stopped from execution?" As I understand, we should ideally have only one instance of this executable file running at a time after server start.

Please correct in case my understanding is incorrect.

Thanks.

Hitesh

RE: k.exe file - What is it and what is its purpose?

davel001150 — Fri, 18 Oct 2019 15:25:46 GMT

In short it's something like an in-memory database that runs the entire application. You need it for Appian to live.

RE: k.exe file - What is it and what is its purpose?

Tim — Fri, 18 Oct 2019 13:30:25 GMT

https://docs.appian.com/suite/help/19.3/Enterprise_Architecture_Overview.html#appian-engines

There's a good description of the entire architecture here along with some detail on K and what it's doing