No this is not on VM. It's a physical box and I can duplicate it from my
Dev, QA and Prod environments by simply turning on the email service.
Then I start getting timesync errors in my system log. BMC told me to
get SUN to help troubleshoot. I didn't know whether I should scream or
laugh at that.

 

From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList)
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Axton
Sent: Tuesday, March 29, 2011 10:34 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Email Issue

 

** Is this a VM?

On Tue, Mar 29, 2011 at 10:03 AM, Tommy Morris
<[email protected]> wrote:

** 

On our Window 2003 servers which run the email service the time gets
continuously ahead until our timesync service can no longer correct the
time. This ONLY happens with the email service turned on. BMC says that
it is an OS issue or a java issue even though we have the same java and
OS on other boxes and there are no issues on anything but the box which
runs the email service. Of course it can't be a java-hogging AR Email
service that is causing the issue.

 

From: Action Request System discussion list(ARSList)
[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of strauss
Sent: Tuesday, March 29, 2011 9:53 AM
To: [email protected]
Subject: Re: Email Issue

 

** 

You won't like the answer, but our 7.1.00.002 server has experienced
random hangs of the MAPI email system since it went live in May 2008,
with an Incident opened in June 2008 that was NEVER RESOLVED.  Also on
Windows 2003 x64, with Outlook 2007 SP1 connecting to Exchange 2007,
with archiving set up to keep the number of sent emails in Exchange down
to a month's worth (25,000 to 40,000 messages).  A nightly escalation
moves all Sent mail to an archive folder, so there is never more than
one day's mail in the Messages form.  Outgoing and incoming mail
interval is 3 minutes, which usually keeps the queue below 60 messages
at any given interval. 

 

Over the years since this system went live, support has shipped me
everything they could think of in the way of modified or instrumented
email engines (up to 7.1.00.004), and nothing that they came up with
prevented the three types of errors:

1. The aremaild.exe process hangs at over 1200 handles with no errors
generated in messages or logs of any kind (normal is 700 to 800 handles
idle, 1000 to 1300 while processing)

2. A java error appears in the Event Log and the service is hung

3. A error is logged in an hs_err_pid####.log file in the \Office12
folder, and the service is hung

 

In most cases the Windows service is hung and cannot be manually stopped
in a normal fashion - it will stop eventually, but issues a message
about not responding. Rarely, you might have to kill the actual process
from the Task Manager. Also rarely, the service is still running but
MAPI processing has stopped (our patch 4 build writes a mapi.log
continuously) and you can restart the service more or less normally
(does not hang while trying to stop).

 

I have had problems with the AREmail engine on Windows with MAPI ever
since they switched it to java, it's just dramatically worse in 7.1.  We
just live with it, keeping a query open in a User Tool 24 hours a day
where we can see it for Email messages where Send = Yes, refreshing
every 5 minutes, and when the screen fills (= over 100 messages) we
restart the service.  A schedule task runs a batch job three times a
day, 5:45 AM, PM, and 11:45 PM that does a net stop and a net start of
the service.  I disabled a fourth one at 11:45 AM because whenever it
fired with a lot of messages in the from waiting to go out, it often
hung within the next 15 minutes.

 

During testing with ARS 7.5 on Windows 2008 R2 we saw even worse
problems with MAPI - the service would not process mail unless you had a
console open, logged in under the account that ran the email service,
and you had started the service from there!!  We plan to use SMTP and
POP for 7.6.0x; it seems to work reliably enough, but then so did 7.1
MAPI back in 2008, until it was put under a normal production load.

 

Christopher Strauss, Ph.D.
Call Tracking Administration Manager
University of North Texas Computing & IT Center
http://itsm.unt.edu/ 

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