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ManageMessageRefCountLog SQL Agent Job failing in BETA2

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Since I have seen enough questions on this, I will officially post here about it (and we might have a KB Article on it ... not sure how that works for BETAs though). There is a new sql agent job you will find on the messagebox database server called ManageMessageRefCountLog_<messagebox>. In the BETA 2 bits you will find this job fails occassionally on both SQL 2000 and 2005. This is a known issue which we are working to fix in RTM. The failure is ignorable. The error stems from this job attempting to start a secondary sql agent job. If that job is already running we get an error. The approach we were using to determine if the job was already running had a race in it, but we did not get to fix this for BETA2. The job is scheduled to restart itself every minute so even if it fails, it will just restart again. This job is part of our cleanup process for deleting messages. The expectation is that this job will run forever. The only negative side effect the failure of this job can have is if you are running in VERY high performance testing, a one minute down time of this job could cause enough spool growth to trigger our throttling mechanism. In this case, you would see throttling kick in due to spool growth and you could see this. We are of course working to fix this for RTM for this reason and for the fact that customers don't seem to like the red X that shows up when it fails. :) :) If you don't know how to monitor throttling counters, I recommend reading through our documentation on this and then checking out the MessageAgent perf counters which are now accessible via perfmon. Significant enhancements have been made here to help maintain a healthy system so you should read up on it.

 

Thx

Lee

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