I've implemented a messaging system over SQL Server Service Broker. It is working great, with the sole exception that every once in a while (maybe once per week per server) my initiator service just vanishes without a trace. The corresponding queue is still there, but the service is missing.

Obviously this causes problems in my system. It's a simple matter to recreate the service by hand, but I'm confused as to what might cause this behavior. I understand that automatic poison message handling causes queues to be disabled, but I don't see anything that indicates services can be disabled or deleted automatically.

When this happens, I usually have a large backlog of messages in multiple application queues, but nothing extreme. Total message backlog is around 200,000.

Does anyone know what might be happening here?