NServiceBus Generic Host and mqsvc.exe high CPU

by | May 7, 2010 | BizTalk Community Blogs via Syndication

We have been doing some work with NServiceBus recently and observed some unusual behaviour which was caused by our mistake and seemed worthy of a small post.

The Scenario

In our solution we were doing some standard NServiceBus stuff by pushing a message to a queue using NServiceBus. We had a direct send/receive scenario rather than a publish/subscribe one.

The background process which was meant to collect the message and then process it was a normal NServiceBus message handler. We would run the NServiceBus.Host.exe which would find the handler and then do the usual NServiceBus magic.

The Problem

In this solution we were creating some automated tests around this module of the integration process to ensure that it would work well. We had two tests.

Test 1

This test would start NServiceBus.Host.exe using the Process object, then seed a message to the queue via our web service fa%u00e7ade sitting above the queue which wrapped NServiceBus. The background process would then process the message and the test would check the message had been processed fine.

If all was well then the NServiceBus.Host.exe process was stopped.

Test 2

In test 2 we would do a very similar thing except that instead of starting the process the test would install NServiceBus.Host.exe as a windows service and then start the service before the test and once the test was executed it would stop the test.

The Results of the Tests

Test 1 worked really well, however in test 2 we found that it didn’t really work at all, instead of doing the background process we were finding that between mqsvc.exe and NServiceBus.Host.exe the CPU on the machine was maxed and nothing was really happening.

The Solution

After trying a few things we found it was the permissions on the queue were not set correctly. Once this was resolved it all worked fine and CPU was not excessive and ran just like the console application.

I think the couple of take aways from this are:

  • Make sure you set the windows service for NserviceBus Generic Host to the right credentials
  • Make sure you have the queue set with the right permissions
  • Make sure you turn on the right logging configuration in NServiceBus

Thanks to Ahmed Hashmi on my team who got this working in the end.