BizTalk Throttling and Threshold Tord Glad Nordahl 26. august 2012 Bouvet BizTalk Innovation Event - BizTalk Throttling and Thresholds

Who am I? BizTalk Administrator for Bouvet Active contributer to the community Blog, www.biztalkadmin.com, www.biztalkadminsblogging.com Microsoft TechNet Wiki, forums and galleries Co-author of BizTalk Administration Essentials Speaker Trainer 26. august 2012 Bouvet BizTalk Innovation Event - BizTalk Throttling and Thresholds

What is thresholds? Containers Limits Bounderies 26. august 2012 Bouvet BizTalk Innovation Event - BizTalk Throttling and Thresholds

How does thresholds affect BizTalk Designed to… manage server resources manage rate-based flow manage dehydration behavior 26. august 2012 Bouvet BizTalk Innovation Event - BizTalk Throttling and Thresholds

Who should change the default settings? When you see thresholds being hit due to Rate of messages Use of server resources However 70% of all companies world-wide never change the defualt setting for threshold, but should they? 26. august 2012 Bouvet BizTalk Innovation Event - BizTalk Throttling and Thresholds

Why would you change them? Grant more resources to an application Limit the application to perform less However these changes only comes into play when you have to change them due to some of the above bullets. 26. august 2012 Bouvet BizTalk Innovation Event - BizTalk Throttling and Thresholds

Resource-based throttling 26. august 2012 Bouvet BizTalk Innovation Event - BizTalk Throttling and Thresholds

Rate-based throttling 26. august 2012 Bouvet BizTalk Innovation Event - BizTalk Throttling and Thresholds

Orchestration throttling 26. august 2012 Bouvet BizTalk Innovation Event - BizTalk Throttling and Thresholds

So what is throttling then? Throttling is a first-aid kit to the environment Prevent melt-downs Prevent memory leaks Prevent developer to bring problems into production But it may also Help you to manage the use of resources based on physical resources or rate of data flow 26. august 2012 Bouvet BizTalk Innovation Event - BizTalk Throttling and Thresholds

Are we throttling now? You can monitor your throttling states Performance Monitor Built in with BizTalk BizTalk Message Agent 26. august 2012 Bouvet BizTalk Innovation Event - BizTalk Throttling and Thresholds

Publishing throttling states 2 – Incoming rate exceeds outgoing rate Counter Sub counter BizTalk:Message Agent Message publishing incoming rate message publishing outgoing rate This will happen if the incoming message rate exceeds the message outgoing rate, and the database experience problems with coping with the increasing amount of messages being published to the BizTalk databases. In order for BizTalk to deal with this problems it simply blocks the publishing of messages until incoming rate is at par with the message outgoing rate. You can view this scenario in real-time by using the performance monitor. 26. august 2012 Bouvet BizTalk Innovation Event - BizTalk Throttling and Thresholds

Publishing throttling states 4 – memory exceeds specified threshold Counter Sub counter BizTalk:Message Agent High process memory process memory usage (MB) process memory usage threshold (MB) This will happen if the incoming message rate exceeds the message outgoing rate, and the database experience problems with coping with the increasing amount of messages being published to the BizTalk databases. In order for BizTalk to deal with this problems it simply blocks the publishing of messages until incoming rate is at par with the message outgoing rate. You can view this scenario in real-time by using the performance monitor 26. august 2012 Bouvet BizTalk Innovation Event - BizTalk Throttling and Thresholds

Publishing throttling states 5- System memory exceeds threshold Counter Sub counter BizTalk:Message Agent Physical memory usage threshold (MB) Physical memory usage (MB) This state couldn't be described any better, the system memory exceeds the specified threshold and simply stops the EPM to start processing new messages and reduce the current EPM thread count, if the reason for this state is because a steep memory usage of a batch file it will take longer to finish it, and if it is too big it will be dropped by BizTalk. use the following counters too see this issue in Performance Monitor 26. august 2012 Bouvet BizTalk Innovation Event - BizTalk Throttling and Thresholds

Publishing throttling states 6 – Host message size Counter Sub counter BizTalk:Message Agent database size BizTalk:MessageBox : General Counters Spool size Tracking data size BizTalk: MessageBox : Host Counters Host queue length Host queue suspend message length The reason why you encounter this state maybe that some of your SQL jobs have stopped, tracking host is not running or the number of suspended messages is high. This state will as the one above create the same scenario as above, it will reduce the threads for EPM, it also blocks the EPM to process any new messages and creates a publishing delay for all messages. In this scenario there are several counters to monitor 26. august 2012 Bouvet BizTalk Innovation Event - BizTalk Throttling and Thresholds

Publishing throttling states 8 – Database session exceeds threshold Counter Sub counter BizTalk:Message Agent Database session This state simply states that the sessions used by the host towards the database exceeds the specified threshold. The auto throttling here will do the same as in state 4 and 6, reduce the threads for EPM and stop the execution of any the threads, it will also delay all ongoing messages until the database is back to normal. If this happens i recommend you to reduce the database connection threshold for the host. You can monitor this by looking at the following counters in Performance Monitor 26. august 2012 Bouvet BizTalk Innovation Event - BizTalk Throttling and Thresholds

Publishing throttling states 9 – Process count exceeds threshold Counter Sub counter BizTalk:Message Agent Thread count Thread count threshold What it says is that the process counts exceeds a specified threshold, the reason for this may be that you have to many transactions on that hosts that creates too many processes, try reducing the amount of allowed threads on the host so that the system don’t create too many threads. The self throttling will do the exact same as in state 8 and basically reduce the EPM thread count, stop it from creating new and messages will be delayed until the host is back to normal state again. You can monitor this by using the following counters in Performance Monitor 26. august 2012 Bouvet BizTalk Innovation Event - BizTalk Throttling and Thresholds

Delivery throttling states 1 – Incoming rate exceeds outgoing rate Counter Sub counter BizTalk:Message Agent Message publishing incoming rate message publishing outgoing rate This happens if the message incoming rate is greater and exceeds the message outgoing rate, it can be caused by a shortage in resources or by high process complexity. BizTalk perform a self throttling blocking the delivery thread for a computed time until the message incoming rate is at par with the outgoing rate. To monitor this use the following counters in the Performance Monitor 26. august 2012 Bouvet BizTalk Innovation Event - BizTalk Throttling and Thresholds

Delivery throttling states 3 – in-process delivery exceeds threshold Counter Sub counter BizTalk:Message Agent In-process message count In-process message count threshold This state informs us that the a number on in-process messages delivered to a service class exceeds the specified threshold and can be caused by processing high complexity messages, slow outbound adapters or a shortage in resources on the server. BizTalk self throttles and slows down the message delivery to XLANG or adapters, It also reduce the size of the thread pool by the message agent. You can monitor this by looking at the following counters in Performance Monitor 26. august 2012 Bouvet BizTalk Innovation Event - BizTalk Throttling and Thresholds

Delivery throttling states 4 – Process memory exceeds threshold Counter Sub counter BizTalk:Message Agent High process memory Process memory usage (MB) Process memory usage threshold (MB) Active instance count In-process message count This one is also covered well in publishing throttling states, it basically tells us that we exceed the specified value of the process memory threshold. It occurs when you have large and complex messages that are being processed, or a high amount of message simultaneously. This sate will not make the system idle so no immediate action is needed if this is a once in a life-time scenario, however BizTalk will still perform self throttling and slow down delivery of messages to adapters and XLANG. It may also reduce the memory usage by dehydrating messages and reduce the size of the EPM thread pool sometimes it also force a .NET garbace collect. you can monitor this by using the counters described below; 26. august 2012 Bouvet BizTalk Innovation Event - BizTalk Throttling and Thresholds

Delivery throttling states 5 - System memory exceeds threshold Counter Sub counter BizTalk:Message Agent Physical memory usage Basically the systems memory exceeds the specified threshold and BizTalk will slow down message delivery to adapters and XLANG, it will also try to decrease the memory consumption by dehydrating messages it also reduce the thread pool size of EPM. If you have this issue often you should consider reducing the EPM thread pool to decrease the occurrence of this throttling state as it will slow down BizTalk drastically. You can read the monitor for this in Performance Monitor as well by using the following counter; 26. august 2012 Bouvet BizTalk Innovation Event - BizTalk Throttling and Thresholds

Delivery throttling states 9 -Process thread count exceeds threshold Counter Sub counter BizTalk:Message Agent Thread count Thread count threshold You will encounter this sate if BizTalk has a process thread count that exceeds the specified threshold. BizTalk will automatic throttle to decrease the thread count used by EPM and you should consider changing the different thread throttling settings for the different hosts. You can monitor this issue too in Performance Monitor by checking the following counters; 26. august 2012 Bouvet BizTalk Innovation Event - BizTalk Throttling and Thresholds