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

2. Who am I? BizTalk Administrator for Bouvet
Active contributer to the community
Blog,
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

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

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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

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

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

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

10. 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

11. 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

12. 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

13. 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

14. 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

15. 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

16. 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

17. 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

18. 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

19. 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

20. 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

21. 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

22. 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