Merge Replication limit running in continuous mode

Hi,
We have a customer site running merge replication with a
publisher/distributer and 12 subscribers. All the merge agents are running in
continuous mode. It seems that two of the agents are always failed, or don't
last long. Is this directly related to the "number of concurrent merge
processes" number? It looks like because there are 10 merge agents *always*
running, the other two don't get a look in. Is this correct?
We can increase this number to 20 and the site seems to run ok, but we've
been hearing rumours that any number past 10 concurrent merge processes gets
unstable. What's the MS position on this?
What's the recommended solution to this situation? Schedule the agents
instead of continuous mode?
What is the error message generated by these two always failing agents?
Do you have the "limit the number of concurrent merge processes to the
following" option checked and set to 10.
What happens is that for long running merge agents the agents will timeout
or deadlock themselves, so MS advised you to limit the number that run
concurrently.
If you do choose this option you have to configure your agents to wait a
longer time before timing out. To do this right click on your merge agents,
select agent properties, click on the Steps tab, and double click on Run
Agent. Place focus in the commands text box, press End, and press the space
bar. enter -StartQueueTimeout 120
This will have the effect of having these two failing merge agents of
waiting up to 2 minutes for the first 10 merge agents in the queue to finish
their work.
I am not sure what the rational for 10 was. The fact it seems to work fine
when you bump it up to 20 seems to indicate that this throttling is not
optimal for you. I suspect that you did not use StartQueueTimeout option.
Running the agents in continuous mode will have no effect. The agents poll
by default every minute, so after the agent completes it will go to sleep
for a minute, and any agents in the queue will have their timeslice.
Hilary Cotter
Looking for a SQL Server replication book?
http://www.nwsu.com/0974973602.html
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"Sydney" <hsc@.newsgroup.nospam> wrote in message
news:5C49D704-C649-41FA-8686-3EA92151867F@.microsoft.com...
> Hi,
> We have a customer site running merge replication with a
> publisher/distributer and 12 subscribers. All the merge agents are running
> in
> continuous mode. It seems that two of the agents are always failed, or
> don't
> last long. Is this directly related to the "number of concurrent merge
> processes" number? It looks like because there are 10 merge agents
> *always*
> running, the other two don't get a look in. Is this correct?
> We can increase this number to 20 and the site seems to run ok, but we've
> been hearing rumours that any number past 10 concurrent merge processes
> gets
> unstable. What's the MS position on this?
> What's the recommended solution to this situation? Schedule the agents
> instead of continuous mode?
>