MSMQ only tries 3 times to receive a message before an error occurs

Question

I have some messages in my queue. Now I notice that after 3 tries the service host faults. Is this a normal behavior? Where does the 3 times comes from? I thought it came from receiveRetryCount. But I set that one to 1.

I got 20 messages in my queue waiting to be processed. The WCF operation that is responsible to process the message supports transaction so if it can't process the message it will throw so that the message stays in the queue.

I didn't think that it would of Fault the ServiceHost after a number of retry, is this part documented somewhere?

I'm running MSMQ service on my winxp machine.

I'm more interested in documentation indicating that the service host will fault after a number of retry. Is this part true?

Answer 1

I think I found the reason why it faults.

There a property on the binding of msmq called ReceiveErrorHandling which is by default set to Fault which will fault the channel listener when receiveRetryCount has been maxed out.

Answer 2

Not sure what this is - I don't use MSMQ myself first hand.

But check out Tom Hollander's excellent blog post series on MSMQ, WCF and IIS: Getting them to play nice (part 1, part 2 and part 3).