Gregg Eldred

Intermittent issues with a Blackberry Enterprise Server (BES) that required a restart caused me to look at the logs to see if I could determine an underlying issue. Since this site had only one BES, running on Domino, the search through the logs didn't really take a lot of time. Just prior to the server hanging, I saw that one user had sent one large e-mail to quite a few internal recipients, most of them with Blackberry devices. The time consuming part was trying to search the Blackberry and Lotus support sites to find a solution. Patience rewarded me with this Blackberry TechNote:

When a large email message that shares a Universal Identifier (UNID) is sent to multiple BlackBerry enabled recipients with accounts on the same BlackBerry Enterprise Server, an increase in memory usage occurs. This may destabilize the BlackBerry Messaging Agent, requiring that it be restarted.

As the BlackBerry Messaging Agent processes email messages, it requests a copy of the email message from the messaging server. The BlackBerry Messaging Agent is a multi-threaded application that can process more than one email message at the same time. A standard deployment of the BlackBerry Enterprise Server in a 32-bit environment has approximately 2 GBs of addressable memory space. A portion of this memory is reserved for processing messages. Sending a large email message to a large number of BlackBerry smartphone users that are on a single BlackBerry Enterprise server could result in attempts to exceed this portion of memory.

As the TechNote recommended, the value of DocumentThrottleMaxDocOpen should be between 20-30, so as not to create really noticeable mail delays. We have it set to 20 and are monitoring the users and the server to see if there are any issues. The command to set the value is:

TraitTool.exe -trait DocumentThrottleMaxDocOpen -global -set [value]

Link: How to control the number of concurrent documents that are opened based on UNID

Technorati tag: Show-n-Tell Thursday SnTT Lotus Domino Blackberry Enterprise Server

Comment posted by Gregg Ginsberg03/19/2009 06:10:39 PM
Homepage: http://www.boxtone.com

Great find, Gregg.

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Comment posted by JYR03/19/2009 08:20:44 PM
Homepage: http://jyriver.blogspot.com

Good catch Gregg, looks similar to my issue
http://jyriver.blogspot.com/2009/02/arghhhhh-bes-server.html

I've looked at the BBerry logs and I can see a Hung thread which is always BlackBerry Messaging Agent (BESAgentController).

JYR

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Comment posted by Gregg Eldred03/19/2009 09:41:10 PM
Homepage: http://www.ns-tech.com/blog/geldred.nsf

@Gregg and @JYR: Thank you for noticing (and commenting). You've validated that there is some value to my "Administrator-centric" SnTT posts.

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Comment posted by JYR03/19/2009 09:51:57 PM
Homepage: http://jyriver.blogspot.com/

@Gregg and @JYR: Thank you for noticing

@Gregg EL. I thought that you we're talking to yourself

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