Windows 2003 Service Pack 2 is out!

Download today!

I've had a quick look in the database to see what MSMQ fixes are "scheduled to be included with Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2" and here's the list of PUBLIC patches:

• 830953 FIX: Applications that use Message Queuing 3.0 and diagnostic tracing may stop responding
• 897688 The computer stops responding and you receive a PAGE_FAULT_IN_NONPAGED_AREA (50) error when Message Queuing 3.0 automatically starts on a Windows Server 2003-based computer
• 898618 FIX: Transactional messages that are addressed to a nonexistent queue remain in the outgoing queue in Message Queuing 3.0
• 899470 FIX: Message Queuing 3.0 may generate excessive network traffic when you try to connect to a remote computer that is offline
• 902951 FIX: A Message Queuing 3.0 message may not be acknowledged
• 908926 FIX: You may experience a decrease in the performance of Message Queuing 3.0 when you send messages between two computers that are running Message Queuing 3.0
• 914012 Message Queuing does not start on a Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 1-based computer
• 916133 FIX: Memory leaks may cause the Message Queuing 3.0 Downlevel Service (Mqdssrv.exe) to fail
• 916699 The message may not be delivered when you use the HTTP protocol to send a message to a server that is running Message Queuing 3.0
• 917399 FIX: Event ID: 4811 occurs when you try to start a queued COM+ application that has a long name and Microsoft Message Queuing is configured for Workgroup mode in Windows Server 2003

There are probably others - sometimes fixes are trivial and don't require KB articles (e.g. typos in help files) or maybe the KB article hasn't been finished yet.

The full list for SP2 is here:

• 914962 List of updates in Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2
• 932745 Windows Server 2003 Service Pack 2 list of updates

No, I have no idea why there are 2 KB articles...

Comments

• Anonymous
  March 14, 2007
  PingBack from http://www.angolodigitale.com/annunci/microsoft-rilascia-il-service-pack-2-per-windows-server-2003/

• Anonymous
  March 19, 2007
  Hello. I am having trouble with MSMQ 3.0 on W2k3 after SP2. We use persistant private queues in one application. We download data from an informix database to create the queue messages. The process that create the queues is now suffering from a slowing down, e.g it gets 350 message in first hour, 151 in second hour, 100 in third etc. Process that would download and create 1220 queuse in 2 hours now runs 17+ hours... Thanks for any help.

• Anonymous
  March 19, 2007
  Hi Timothy. So after SP2, you're seeing a big performance hit? ((Could you please confirm that you are talking about creating messages and not queues? I assume you mean messages and that you are not re-creating queues all the time.)) The problem with troubleshooting this problem is that the message creation rate is dependent on how fast the data can be pulled from the Informix database as well. The time spent actually sending a message is pretty trivial - I am expecting the overhead to be in generating the data to build up the message as this is where traditionally a lot more CPU cycles are consumed. I would expect that if you had a simple test application generating messages that these would fly from sender to destination queue. Is there any way to generate logging within your application so you can get more granular data on where the time is being spent? Cheers John Breakwell

• Anonymous
  March 19, 2007
  The comment has been removed

• Anonymous
  March 19, 2007
  MSMQ has hardly changed at all between SP1 and SP2 and there should be no surprises. Updates to MDAC would definitely be a good place to start - the Informix admins should be able to give you some performance figures on the queries that your application is making to read/write the records, such as how long they are taking to complete. Also, they can tell you if the queries/updates have a different structure since the application of sp2 - maybe they are now performing more complicated queries through some changes to the way the MDAC drivers work. Or there could be changes in how the security is handled, for example, which cause more round-trips to a domain controller. Unfortunately there are many  possibilities and you will have to visit each in turn to determine where your performamce has gone. Cheers John

• Anonymous
  March 19, 2007
  Thanks. We now appear to be having performance issues in other applications that do not use MSMQ at all and have a SQL Server back end, so I think you are correct that this is outside of MSMQ... Thanks Again. Fun.

• Anonymous
  March 21, 2007
  Just to update... Uninstall of SP2 made everything better again. We are opening a case with Microsoft on the issue. Thanks

• Anonymous
  April 23, 2007
  If you are sending transactional messages and they seem to get stuck in the outgoing queue then it may

• Anonymous
  September 02, 2007
  We implemented Win2003 sp2 on one of our msmq servers. Now our NT4 :-() clients can nolonger communicate with it (distributed transactions) ! We've opened msdtc-security (on-authentication ). Any hints ?

• Anonymous
  September 03, 2007
  Are you using MSMQ messages within a MSDTC distributed transaction? Or is this just a problem involving transactions with some other Resource Manager that happens to be on the MSMQ server? What sort of problems do you see - errors, etc? I would recommend using DTCPIng and DTCTester to see if they reveal any underlying problems.