Hi, we have a biztalk server (a virtual one (1!)...) at our company, and an sql server where the data is being kept. Now we have a lot of data traffic. I'm talking about hundred of thousands. So I'm actually not even sure if one server is pretty safe, but our company is not that easy to convince.

Now recently we have a lot of problems.

Allow me to situate in detail, so I'm not missing anything:

Our server has 5 applications:

• One with 3 orchestrations, 12 send ports, 16 receive locations.
• One with 4 orchestrations, 32 send ports, 20 receive locations.
• One with 4 orchestrations, 24 send ports, 20 receive locations.
• One with 47 (yes 47) orchestrations, 37 send ports, 6 receive locations.
• One with common application with a couple of resources.

Our problems have occured since we deployed the applications with the 47 orchestrations. A lot of these orchestrations use assign shapes which use c# code to do the mapping. This is because we use HL7 extensions and this is kind of special, so by using c# code & xpath it was a lot easier to do the mapping because a lot of these schema's look alike. The c# reads in XmlNodes received through xpath, and returns XmlNode which are then assigned again to biztalk messages. I'm not sure if this could be the cause, but I thought I'd mention it.

The send and receive ports have a lot of different types: File, MQSeries, SQL, MLLP, FTP. Each of these types have a different host instances, to balance out the load. Our orchestrations use the BiztalkApplication host.

On this server also a couple of scripts are running, mostly ftp upload scripts & also a zipper script, which zips files every half an hour in a daily zip and deletes the zip files after a month. We use this zipscript on our backup files (we backup a lot, backups are also on our server), we did this because the server had problems with sending files to a location where there were a lot (A LOT) of files, so after the files were reduced to zips it went better.

Now the problems we are having recently are mainly two major problems:

• Our most important problem is the following. We kept a receive location with a lot of messages on a queue for testing. After we start this receive location which uses the 47 orchestrations, the running service instances start to sky rock. Ok, this is pretty normal. Let's say about 10000, and then we stop the receive location to see how biztalk handles these 10000 instances. Normally they would go down pretty fast, and it does sometimes, but after a while it starts to "throttle", meaning they just stop being processed and the service instances stay at the same number, for example in 30 seconds it goes down from 10000 to 4000 and then it stays at 4000 and it lowers very very very slowly, like 30 in 5minutes or something. So this means, that all the other service instances of the other applications are also stuck in here, and they are also not processed.

We noticed that after restarting our host instances the instance number went down fast again. So we tried to selectively restart different host instances to locate the problem. We noticed that eventually restarting the file send/receive host instance would do the trick. So we thought file sends would be the problem. Concidering that we make a lot of backups. So we replaced the file type backups with mqseries backups. The same problem occured, and funny thing, restarting the file send/receive host still fixes the problem.

No errors can be found in the event viewer either.

• A second problem we're having is. That sometimes at arround 6 am, all or a part of the host instances are being stopped.

In the event viewer we noticed the following errors (these are more than one):

The receive location "MdnBericht SQL" with URL "SQL://ZNACDBPEG/mdnd0001/" is shutting down. Details:"The error threshold has been exceeded. The receive location is shutting down.".

The Messaging Engine failed to add a receive location "M2m Othello Export Start Bestand" with URL "\m2mservices\Othello_import$\DataFilter Start*.xml" to the adapter "FILE". Reason: "The FILE adapter cannot access the folder \m2mservices\Othello_import$\DataFilter Start. Verify this folder exists. Error: Logon failure: unknown user name or bad password. ".

The FILE adapter cannot access the folder \m2mservices\Othello_import$\DataFilter Start. Verify this folder exists. Error: Logon failure: unknown user name or bad password.

An attempt to connect to "BizTalkMsgBoxDb" SQL Server database on server "ZNACDBBTS" failed. Error: "Login failed for user ''. The user is not associated with a trusted SQL Server connection."

It woould seem that there's a login failure at this time and that because of it other services are also experiencing problems, and eventually they are shut down.

The thing is, our user is admin, and it's impossible that it's password is wrong "sometimes". We have concidering that the problem could be due to an infrastructure problem, but that's not really are department.

I know it's a long post, but we're not sure anymore what to do. Would adding another server and balancing the load solve our problems? Is there a way to meassure our balance and know where to start splitting? What are normal numbers of load etc?

I appreciate any answers because these issues are getting worse and we're also on a deadline.

Thanks a lot for replies!