It is found that some BizTalk Receive Locations are disabled after server reboot (BizTalk server and SQL Server are separately installed to different physical servers)
Is there any idea on this scenario? Due to the boot sequence or other issues?
I will assume that, once you enable the receive locations manually, they are working correctly.
Typically, when FILE receive locations fail while pointing to an external server/share, it is because they are no longer available.
Make sure that, during the night, there are no network issues, planned/unplanned downtime of the share (= here your SQL server). A BizTalk receive location will retry to access a share for quite a while before disabling itself. Check the event log(s) for more information. You would want to look for errors/warnings there indicating an issue with connectivity between BizTalk and SQL.
Another issue might be that there are too many connections between your BizTalk server and SQL server. You can provide a maximum number of connections in the FILE share properties.
Also, you could try this link: https://serverfault.com/questions/235032/intermittent-connection-to-windows-7-shared-folder-from-windows-xp-workstations
It describes a potential fix for optimizing throughput for file sharing, although it depends on your operating system.
Related
I have an BizTalk application which loops on a XML and send data to SQL server database. The orchestration works fine on the DEV machine throughout the process and is consistent. But if I process the same file on the QA machine it starts with the same speed and then the performance keeps on degrading. There is no issue on the Database object, the throttling settings are the same compared to DEV. I restarted the machine. Not sure why QA is reacting this way for this application.
What are the areas to be checked?
There are various factors which can cause this and overall your solution performance:
Is QA a shared environment, i.e. there are other solutions on it
which may cause the slow down?
If you are sharing hosts on which orchestration is running then that host might be throttling due to various reasons such as memory issues etc, Use performance counter to monitor the host throttling state.
You may have too many persistent points in orchestration, since you are looping and sending message to sql db in loop. if you are using send shape it will cause persistent point per send in loop,will degrade performance considerable.
Isolate the issue i.e. whether it is orchestration running slow or
sending to SQL is taking time.
Tracking is turned on and DTA jobs are not running
Message clean jobs not running as expected in QA
I wrote a blog about how to use SQL Server Profiler to capture the RPC call from BizTalk to SQL Server. You could isolate whether SQL is causing the issue that way; capture the RPC call on DEV or QA, and then try running just the stored procedure on QA. If it doesn't run as quickly as on DEV, that's your problem. If it does, look at your BizTalk artifacts.
Here's the blog: http://blog.tallan.com/2015/01/09/capturing-and-debugging-a-sql-stored-procedure-call-from-biztalk/
BizTalk host throttled because DatabaseSize exceeded the configured throttling limit. Also The SQL Server Agent was not running on the server, so purge processes did not run. This looks to have built up the database size over time until Biztalk throttled the application due to the resources being low
By reading documents on MSDN, I realized that it is recommended to create separate hosts by functionality (Sending hosts, Receiving hosts and Processing hosts). And if there is only one host in this bizTalk server, this host can perform all receiving, sending, and processing messages functionality.
My question is: Is it possible to have multiple hosts that each host can perform its own sending, receiving and processing function , and not affect each other?
This is for multiple developers working on the same project, because our current situation doesn't allow us to have a full set of SQL Server Database and SQL server for each developer or using VM.
Thanks a lot!
Multiple hosts is not a solution for letting multiple developers work on a single server. A single send/receive adapter can only be assigned to one host.
You will also run into other problems, as all the configuration settings are shared in a single database, a change from 1 developer will effect the others.
This same question was asked and answered at MSDN. What you are trying to do is not supported and will not work. There is no way around this.
You must deploy the same application code to each computer in a BizTalk Group.
Sharing a BizTalk computer for development work is not a workable or productive solution and will have a definite negative affect on productivity.
You are correct, the best way to handle DEV is a VM with the entire stack. This is the issue you must address in your environment.
BizTalk Server complains from time to time:
Reading error. Failed to recover from previous error. SQLServer: XXX, Database: BizTalkMsgBoxDb.
Should I care this, or simply ignore it?
Looks like a temporary loss of connectivity to the MessageBox. Not good, but also not critical as long as connectivity is restored quickly enough. The specific error message relates to BAM, which you can switch off if not being used. However, the problem will affect BizTalk as a whole.
You would have to find out what's causing the loss of connectivity and address that. Might not be easy, mind you, I have seen this happening on DEV boxes with both BizTalk and SQL Server on the same box...
BizTalk Server 2006: BAM FAQ
As per Fabio, the message you received is likely to be specific to BAM.
The types of error that you get in your eventlog if BizTalk hosts and ENTSSO does lose connectivity with SQL are listed here
These errors are more serious and can result in the loss of messages (Hosts and Receive Locations are usually stopped).
These errors can occur intermittently and then a minute or two later you see
Communication with MessageBox BizTalkMsgBoxDb on SQL Instance XXX has
been re-established
Common causes of BizTalk : SQL Connectivity issues are listed here
We've found the usual culprit of connectivity issues to be the TCP/IP SynAttackProtect security feature on the SQL Server host - BizTalk can hog a lot of SQL Connections, especially during a 'ramp up' of connections required when a batch of messages comes in after a protacted idle period.
I've got a number of ASP.Net websites (.Net v3.5) running on a server with a SQL 2000 database backend. For several months, I've been receiving seemingly random InvalidOperationExceptions with the message "Internal connection fatal error". Sometimes there's a few days in between, while other times there are multiple errors per day.
The exception is not limited to one site in particular, though they share business and data access assemblies. The error seems to always be thrown from SqlClient.TdsParser.Run(). It sometimes is thrown from old-school direct SqlCommand.Execute() calls, while other times it is thrown from Linq2Sql code.
I've been assured by the network guys that there are no errors or packets lost on their end. Has anyone else experienced this? Could it be a driver problem? We have been unable as of yet to pinpoint a specific trigger for this exception.
We're running II6 on Windows Server 2003.
After a few months of ignoring this issue, it started to reach a critical mass as traffic gradually increased. Under heavy load, including some crawlers, things got crazy and these errors poured in nonstop.
Through trial and error, we eventually tracked down a handful of SqlCommand or LINQ queries whose SqlConnection wasn't closed immediately after use. Instead, through some sloppy programming originating from a misunderstanding of LINQ connections, the DataContext objects were disposed (and connections closed) only at the end of a request rather than immediately.
Once we refactored these methods to immediately close the connection with a C# "using" block (freeing up that pool for the next request), we received no more errors. While we still don't know the underlying reason that a connection pool would get so mixed up, we were able to cease all errors of this type. This problem was resolved in conjunction with another similar error I posted, found here: Why is my SqlCommand returning a string when it should be an int?
Sounds like the database connection is getting dropped or timing out.
We recently had similar issues moving to IIS 6 from IIS 5 connecting to SQL 2000. Our issue was solved by increasing number of ephemeral ports available.
Look at the usage of the ephemeral ports by the IIS server. The default max no. of ports available is normally 4000. You might want to consider increasing this if the sites on your server are particularly busy or your application is making a lot of database calls.
You can monitor these first to see if going over max limit.
Search Microsoft Knowledge base for "MaxUserPort" and "TcpTimedWaitDelay" and make necessary registry changes. Make sure you back up registry or snapshot server before making the changes. Will need to reboot for changes to take effect.
You should double check your database and recordset connection are being closed after use. Not closing will use up this port range unnecessarily.
Check the efficiency of your stored procedures anyway as they might be taking longer than they need too.
"If you rapidly open and close 4000 sockets in less than four minutes, you will reach the default maximum setting for client anonymous ports, and new socket connection attempts fail until the existing set of TIME_WAIT sockets times out." - from http://support.microsoft.com/kb/328476
Check your server's LOG folder (\program files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.1\MSSQL\LOG or similar) for files named SqlDump*.mdmp and SqlDump*.txt. If you do find any you'll have to take it to Product Support.
I was creating a new EF Core project and was trying to create the database to an external Linux server instead of a Windows Server or local one. After hours of searching I found out that I am using MySQL instead of the Microsoft SQL server.
I found it weird that everyone was using 1433 instead of the usual 3306. So to fix my 'Internal connection fatal error' I had to set up a docker instance of SQL Server bound to its default port of 1433.
It literally was that simple. In the docker repo look for "microsoft-mssql-server" and run the image as described neatly in the description below. Everything works now and I am able to push my database from my EF Core project to an external server.
I have an application with a file receive location. After the host instance has been running for a few hours the receive location fails to identify new files dropped into the folder that it is monitoring. It doesn't forget about them altogether, it's just that performance grinds to a crawl. The receive location is configured to poll the target folder every 60 seconds but after host instance has been running for an hour or so, then it seems that the target folder is being polled only every thirty minutes. If I restart the host instance then the files waiting in the target folder are collected right away and performance is fine for the next hour or so.
The same application runs fine in a different environment.
There are now obvious entries in the event log related to the problem.
All the BizTalk SQL jobs are running fine except for Backup BizTalk Server (BizTalkMgmtDb).
Any suggestions gratefully received.
Thanks
Rob
Here are some additional tools which may help you identify and diagnose BizTalk database issues.
BizTalk MsgBox Viewer
Here is a tool to repair identified errors:
Terminator
Use at your own risk... read the glogs and docs. Start with the message box viewer and let us know our results.
Without more details, the biggest tell is that your Backup Job is failing. If the backup job is failing, it may not be properly configured. If it is properly configured and still failing, then you've got other issues. Can you give us some more information about your BizTalk install.
What version are you running?
What are our database sizes?
What are your purge and archive settings like?
Is there any long running blocks in your SQL Server DB coming from BizTalk?
Another thing to consider is the user accounts the send, receive and orchestration hosts are running under. Please check the BizTalk Administration Console. If they are all running the same account, sometimes the orchestrations can starve the send and receive processes of CPU time. I believe priority is given to orchestrations then receive, then send. Even if you are just developing, it is useful to use separate accounts for this. This also improves security.
The Wrox BizTalk Server 2006 will also supply tuning advice.
What other things are going on with the server? Is BizTalk pegged otherwise or is it idle?
You mention that the solution does not have any problems in another environment, so it's likely that there is a configuration problem.
Check the following:
** On SQL Server, set some upper memory limit for SQL Server. By default, SQL Server uses whatever it can get and then hangs onto it, so set a reasonable limit so that your system can operate without spending a lot of time paging memory onto and from your hard drive(s).
** Ensure that you have available disk space - maybe you are running low - this can lead to all kinds of strange problems.
** Try to split up the system's paging file among its physical drives (if you have more than one drive on the system). Also consider using a faster drive, or if you have lots of cash laying around, get a SAN.
** In BizTalk, is tracking enabled? If so, are you also tracking message bodies? Disable tacking or message body tracking and see if there is a difference.
** Start performance monitor and monitor the following counters when running your solution
Object: BizTalk Messaging
Instance: (select the receiving host) %%
Counter: Documents Received/Sec
Object: BizTalk Messaging
Instance: (select the transmitting host) %%
Counter: Documents Sent/Sec
Object: XLANG/s Orchestrations
Instance: (select the processing host) %%
Counter: Orchestrations Completed/Sec.
%% You may have only one host, so just use it. Since BizTalk configurations vary, I am using generic names for hosts.
The preceding counters monitor the most basic aspects of your server, but may help to narrow down places to look further. You can, of course, add CPU and Memory too. If you have time (days...maybe weeks) you could monitor for processes that allocate memory and never release it. Use the following counter...
Object: Memory
Counter: Pool Nonpaged Bytes
Slow decline of this counter indicates that a process is not releasing memory, which affects everything on the system.
Let us know how things turn out!
I had the same problem with, when my orchestration was idle for some time it took a long time to process the first msg. A article of EvYoung helped me solve this problem.
"This is caused by application domain unloading within the BizTalk host process. If an AppDomain is shutdown after idle, the next message that comes needs to wait for the Orchestration to compile again. Depending on the complexity of your design, this can be a noticeable wait. To prevent this in low latency requirement scenario, you can modify the BTSNTSVC.EXE.config file and set SecondsIdleBeforeShutdown property to -1. This will prevent AppDomain shutdown due to idle."
You can find the article in here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/biztalkcpr/archive/2008/05/08/thoughts-on-orchestration-performance.aspx
It took me to long to respond but i thought i might help someone. cheers :)
Some good suggestions from others. I will add :
Do you have any custom receive pipeline components on the receive location ? If so perhaps one is leaking memory, calling some external component eg database which is taking a long time ?
How big are the files you are receiving ?
On the File transport properties of your receive location, set "file renaming" on, do the files get renamed within 60s.