BizTalk 2006 R2 - Throttling - Perfmon Parameters - My Experience

BREAKING NEWS:These days.. Dr. Time Pass is spending most of time to understand and implement best throttling scenarios :-).

Let me come back to official language. Few day back, I saw lots of throttling in our BizTalk environment. My enthusiasm drag me to the further exploration in throttling mechanism. Let me grab opportunity to document some cooked things.

Since last weeks, I saw my BizTalk environment is facing suddenly unusual throttling behaviors so I tried to find the root cause behind the throttling state in my BizTalk environment.

The environment is facing lots of message delivery throttling during pick processing hours, and due to the delivery throttling state, and delays our whole environment get stunned. After this incidence, I start taking this functionality very seriously and now digging lots of stuff related to it, here in this article I am going to share my experience as well as the understanding I got after going through many books, articles and MS-KBs.

As we all BizTalk professional aware about the inbound message processing and the internal BizTalk instruments takes care about the inbound message management. In short if I like to explain the word "inbound message" then I can stat "messages towards messagebox" as inbound messages, in BizTalk messagebox is the heart of any environment or implementation. We were facing problem due to unsymmetrical messages' incoming publishing rate and messages' outgoing publishing rate, I noticed in our environment incoming message rate is very high in compare to outgoing message (here outgoing means subscription to messagebox, we are talking about deliveries), in resultant the number was increasing for the messages in memory. BizTalk recognized and our environment moves towards throttling state but still throttling was also not able to make the system stable and put it again towards stable node. Due to the very heavy message rush and less outgoing rate very high number of the messages were waiting in queue for processing. We saw almost 300-700 seconds as delay time during the processing. And finally the nightmare came to true :-0, and counter called "Days without Servility 1" need to reset. The thing I would like to convey is the requirement of the optimized configuration parameter for the throttling while setting up any host. I will stat 'must' recommend for setting-up a set of well configured and planned host for the pick time processing for the critical interfaces. I don't want to drive my article into implementation designing, but I would like to come back to the throttling scenarios.



In this article I would like to focus around perfmon counters, few important ratios, throttling states.

Let's dig first to some state counters, state counters shows the state of the current situation in your environment under monitor. BizTalk 2006/R2 comes with very useful perfmon state counters.

some high (*) counters like High database session, High database size, High in-process message count, High message delivery rate, High process memory, High system memory, High thread count, these all counters represents only a state by showing value like 0 or 1, where 1 the respective focused area cross the configured or warning level. These shows very useful information which should be monitor in your Biztalk environment.

In-process message count, Active instance count are two message queue counters which show the Number of in-memory messages delivered to the XLANG engine or the outbound messaging engine that are not yet processed and instances are in active state in memory referring to the EPM or XLANG engine, respectively.

Specialized message delivery counters like Message delivery delay (ms), Message delivery incoming rate, Message delivery outgoing rate, Message delivery throttling state, Message delivery throttling state duration, Message delivery throttling user override. These all perfmon counters should be monitored regularly during the pick processing to understand the behavior of your environment and the coming out patterns to understand and prevent the failures.

Message delivery delay (ms): The current delay in ms imposed on each message publishing batch (applicable if the message publishing is being throttled and if the batch is not exempted from throttling).

Message publishing incoming rate: Number of messages per second that are being sent to the database for publishing in the given sample interval.

Message publishing outgoing rate: Number of messages per second that are actually published in the database in the given sample interval.

Message publishing throttling state:

• 0: Not throttling
  
• 2: Throttling due to imbalanced message publishing rate (input rate exceeds output rate)
  
• 4: Throttling due to process memory pressure
  
• 5: Throttling due to system memory pressure
  
• 6: Throttling due to database growth
  
• 8: Throttling due to high session count
  
• 9: Throttling due to high thread count
  
• 11: Throttling due to user override on publishing

Message publishing throttling state duration: Seconds since the system entered this state. If the host is throttling, how long it has been throttling; if it is not throttling, how long since throttling was applied.

I would like to place basic example of some perfmon data and counters in graph representation.



I will try to explore on Message publishing throttling states on my coming articles.

Thanks for BEAR me during the article. Your valuable feedback and suggestion are welcome to nilayparikh@gmail.com

Related articles posted by on the same blogs.
1. BizTalk Server 2006 / R2 Throttling Mechanisms