Azure ServiceBus Queue Timing Out

Question

Encountering a strange issue with one of our queues (for production, no less). When I try to put a message onto the queue, it's throwing an exception that simply states:

A timeout has occurred during the operation

The messages do seem to be making it onto the queue, as evidenced by the fact that I can see the queue length increasing in the management portal. However, the client application is not receiving any messages.

The management portal shows that there have been several failed requests, and also several internal server exceptions; though unfortunately I don't see any way to get more details about those failed requests and errors.

I'm somewhat at a loss as to what may have caused this, how to get more information about what's wrong, and how to move ahead in troubleshooting this. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

edit: I should mention just for completeness sake, that I did not make any changes to the clients that I'm aware of; This issue just sort of started happening all of a sudden

edit #2, woke up this morning, and things have magically returned to normal. Still not sure what happened, so I'd like to change the tone of the question to solicit suggestions as to how this kind of thing may be mitigated and/or troubleshooted (troubleshot? troubleshat? :) ) better

Answer 1

I have experienced this scenario too. When I tried too create a new service bus namespace, and pointed my app to this new namespace, it worked for me. This suggests that it might be some hardware failure going on (on the node where your sb-namespace resides).

Be sure to use transient failure handling, for example http://www.nuget.org/packages/EnterpriseLibrary.WindowsAzure.TransientFaultHandling/

But there might as well be required too use a "second level retry" for errors that are not transient. This you have to code yourself.

Too be more fault tolerant you can also use the new feature of paired namespaces. Here is a good resource: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn292562.aspx

Hth

//Peter