SQL Agent Error: Unable to start JobManager thread for job XXXX

Question

Hi All,

This week we got really weird error for SQL Agent running jobs on our production server. We have about 12-15 jobs running using SQL Agent. Everything was working fine (at least no error logs or warning messages), but then few days out of blue our watchdog application sending us alerts about failing jobs ... upon viewing SQL Agent log files, we find that for almost all job (that are scheduled to run,some jobs are running just once a day since they were not running at that moment there was no log for them) SQL Server was showing us following error ..

[380]Unable to start JobManager thread for job JOB_NAME

Now, after some digging on internet we found that there can be few causes for this sort of issue ...

No. of jobs running at any given time is more than no. of threads for SQL Agent. But I checked it in registry and we have enough threads setup.

I also checked for any sort of conflicts between jobs but it doesn't look like that (at least not that I know of :) )

We solved our issue by simply restarting SQL Agent so everything is back to normal since then (at least for now). But our concern is why this has happened, so we can prevent it in future.

Just for info @ our production system

OS: Windows Server 2003 Ent. Edition. SP2

SQL Server 2005

Processors : 8 and RAM: 12 GB

Any insight or suggestion is really appreciated ...

Thanks,

-Jack

 

 

Answer 1

Wow not a single reply ??

And yet more than 190 views !!

Answer 2

Hi,

I have seen such issue in SQL Server 2000, the cause is that DLLs mismatch, they are not in the same build. When you applied SP2 for SQL Server 2005, have you upgrade all features; or that job invoke different features, some of them are not upgraded to the same build. Could you please let us know Wha that job is performing? Please also post version info by running SELECT @@VERSION statement.

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Best Regards,
Chunsong Feng

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Answer 3

Thanks for replying..

Actually we never had SQL Server 2000. We have built on SQL Server 2005 only.

This errors happened for specifically 5 jobs. And all of them does different tasks using SPs. In general they are updating tables either by processing data from XML files or by fetching data from staging tables. And those jobs run at specific interval of time at 24 X 7. Weird thing is these jobs have been running fine since long time, and even today they are running OK !!

Answer 4

Can you check if there is something interesting in System and Application event log at the same time like crash of some executable?

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Balmukund Lakhani | Please mark solved if I've answered your question, vote for it as helpful to help other user's find a solution quicker
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Answer 5

Hi Balmukund,

I checked both App and Sys Logs ... I can only see these errors for that time period...

The SQL Server Agent (ECWC) service terminated unexpectedly.  It has done this 16 time(s). In Sys Log and

Windows cannot load extensible counter DLL MSOLAP$ECWC, the first DWORD in data section is the Windows error code. in App Log

Now, I was running perfo mon trace for some system and sql parameters so I know that error is App log is just because of permission thing. And error is Sys Log is the event when we restarted the SQL Agent (I guess).

So there was nothing specific to the reason why job failed :(

 

Answer 6

"The SQL Server Agent (ECWC) service terminated unexpectedly.  It has done this 16 time(s). "

Above is the cause of worry. SQLAgent died automatically 16 times!!!

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Balmukund Lakhani | Please mark solved if I've answered your question, vote for it as helpful to help other user's find a solution quicker
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This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.
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My Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/blakhani
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Answer 7

Just asking...

Doesn't this error mean that it is total ... including today (day when error happened) + all past days when we restarted SQL Agent ??

Or it simply means that SQL Agent terminated 16 times just today (day when error happened)  ??

Also even if second one is correct then we may have found error message ... but not yet the cause. I am clueless for where to look for the error because the message is not descriptive.

 

Answer 8

Anyone ??

Any suggestions ??

Answer 9

Sorry for delay.
You should open case with SQL Support team at Microsoft for investigation. Since this is a crash of sqlagent.exe, we (CSS) need to take crash dump and need to analyze it.

http://support.microsoft.com/gethelp/default.aspx?content=kb;en-us;981273

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Balmukund Lakhani | Please mark solved if I've answered your question, vote for it as helpful to help other user's find a solution quicker
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My Blog: http://blogs.msdn.com/blakhani
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