Azure service bus timeout

Question

Today I had a problem sending messages to an azure service bus topic. I have 260 subscribers. Most of them had 0 messages pending, a few that had their client application switched off had about 8,000 pending messages.

My topic is called arklefeed, when I started getting the timeouts in my application, I opened the sample application, Service Bus Explorer.

I was able to view my Topic and subscriptions. Sending messages gave timeouts. Exception: A timeout has occurred during the operation.. TrackingID:Guid_GO_B12.

I then created a new topic called testtopic in the same namespace and tried sending messages via Service bus explorer, this worked fine.

After this to get back up and running quickly I deleted my topic and recreated the subscriptions. After this the message sending worked fine.

I have seen this online, but I can't see where I'm breaking any of the rules: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/ee732538.aspx

What could have been causing my initial timeouts? Could it have been a build up of messages not being collected, or do I have too many subscribers?

Answer 1

When a call to Service Bus fails with a exception that returns a tracking id, you can use that to get more detailed info from Windows Azure Support: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/support/contact/

What you describe above may have been a temporary issue causing unavailability for that particular topic. You can always look at current and historical service status at: http://www.windowsazure.com/en-us/support/service-dashboard/ or contact support to get root cause of the failures.

Any errors that are related to quotas will be indicated with QuotaExceededException http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/microsoft.servicebus.messaging.quotaexceededexception.aspx

If you are pushing a particular Queue/Topic over capacity then you can expect to see a ServerBusyException http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windowsazure/microsoft.servicebus.messaging.serverbusyexception.aspx