How to stop applications from unloading inBizTalk 2004

Recently we developed a time sensitive BizTalk application where a simple set of processing steps were invoked via a web service.

The external calling application (the application calling the BizTalk process) had just 5 seconds to complete its task. Since the BizTalk part was not very complex or resource intensive, we were achieving response times of 1 second, well within the 5 second margin.

During testing, though, we were getting intermittent timeouts because the BizTalk application was unloading itself from memory and causing the calling application to timeout. Basically it took more than 5 seconds for the unloaded BizTalk application to start itself up again and caused a failure.

BizTalk relies on a configuration file to store its application information. This config file contains settings for unloading an application from memory and is located at \Program Files\Microsoft BizTalk Server 2004\BTSNTSvc.exe.config. Full documentation can be found at Microsoft’s website but here is a working example you can download.

By default BizTalk has 2 shutdown settings which are:

SecondsIdleBeforeShutdown = 1800 (seconds, or 30 minutes)
SecondsEmptyBeforeShutdown = 1200 (seconds, 20 minutes)

The link below is a sample config file that never shuts down. We are isolating these “hot” processes on a separate server from the “cold” processes (processes that can safely unload). You can run hot and cold side by side as well but that requires more changes in the config file. If you set the SecondsIdleBeforeShutdown and SecondsEmptyBeforeShutdown to -1 they will always stay in memory.

Note that this is increasing the load on the server but for time sensitive situations this could save you a rash of intermittent errors in production. Note also that you shouldn’t do this unless you really need to, unloading saves resources and with most integration scenarios the few seconds it takes to start up are minor.

You can backup your current file, download this BTSNTSvc.exe.config zip file and extract it, then stop and start your BizTalk host to see it work.