the ghost in the maschine

Hi Gurus,

I don’t think that this is a problem which exists somewhere else, but it is that mysterious, that I want to tell you the story. Maybe someone already had the same problem.

I have a bunch of assemblies running on the BizTalk server. They are doing periodically lookups in directorys to process files, sql-queries to prozess sql data. Btw, the BizTalk Server runs on the same machine as the SQL 2008 Server.

The SQL-Server is not under very heavy load. But at some time (don’t know why), the running instances begin to raise. From normale 0-20 up to 100-150. After investigation I see in my system log (which the BizTalk Assemblies are using to write events for protocolling the start of an instance) that the intances have something like a time-out. 5 Minutes no messages, then some (2-5) messages about starting instances, then a 5 minute gap, again some messages and so on.

The mystic thing is, that the gap of nearly exact 5 minutes appears on and on for hours. As soon as I stop the service and restart it, the gap disappears and the BizTalk server is working fine and all running instances are finished.

After some hours the problem is appearing again. I can’t find nothing in the system logs (special errors or something) and no locks on the databases, no problems with memory, database sizes or anything else.

One thing I want to mark out is that the assemblies are using a DLL I wrote for processing special SQL-requests, writes, and other stuff.

Any idea?