BTSNTSvc High CPU when idle

Question

We have a BizTalk test/development environment consisting of two key environments. In development, the BizTalk server and SQL servers are on two separate servers both of which run at around 5-10% when idle (i.. there is nothing going through the BizTalk environment). In test the BizTalk environment is running on a clustered environment to mimic the live environment again with BizTalk and SQL in separate servers in the cluster. However, in this environment the BizTalk server runs at about 40% utilization even when idle and the SQL server is running at enything up to 90% even when idle. Lowering the BizTalk polling interval on the test environments helps the CPU utilization but adversely affects response time through BizTalk.

I suspect there is a high cost of calling the SQL ennvironment in the clustered environment but am not sure how to check/monitor/reduce this. Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks

Nigel

Answer 1

Hi,

I think you should start with running the BizTalk Messagebox viewer tool on the test environment: http://blogs.technet.com/jpierauc/pages/msgboxviewer.aspx

Also try to use performance monitor with (BizTalk) performance counters to get a better feeling of what is going on the BizTalk Server and SQL Server. What is it that takes this amount of resources?

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HTH,

Randal van Splunteren - MVP, MCTS BizTalk Server
http://biztalkmessages.vansplunteren.net

Please mark as answered if this answers your question.

Check out the PowerShell provider for BizTalk: http://psbiztalk.codeplex.com

Answer 2

Hi,

Please make sure that SQL server agent is running and BizTalk related jobs are enabled and running properly as many times bizTalk does not perform well due to too many messages in messagebox because of SQL jobs not running properly.  Please check the log size of BizTalkMsgBoxDb and BizTalkDtaDb transaction log files.  BizTalk MessageBoxViewer (as mentioned by Randal) is a great tool to detect such issues. 

Regards,

Tariq Majeed

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Please mark it as answer if it helps

Answer 3

Hi Nigel,

As Tariq and Randal suggested, please run messagebox viewer tool to track down what happens. If no clue, you may consider opening a support incident to Microsoft Customer Support Service. We will assist on debugging this kind of high CPU issues.

To obtain the phone numbers for specific technology request please take a look at the web site listed below.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=fh;EN-US;PHONENUMBERS

If you are outside the US please see http://support.microsoft.com for regional support phone numbers.

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Answer 4

Thanks to everyine for the feedback - i have downloaded the MessageBoxViewer which has highlighted a number of potential issue which we are looking into.