Distribution service not working anymore - Temp cache folder contains about 1000 items

[Darius_Havenga]

Good day from South Africa.

I have a problem with the distribution service on one of our customers. It suddenly stopped working over the weekend.

And there are about 1000 items in the temp cache folder. Nothing changed. If I send a test mail from the Distribution service interface, it delivers to the recipient. 

Only thing we did was to make a clone of the VM to commission a test environment.

There are no errors in the diagnostic console or event viewer. And the service is running as normal.

Can anyone please assist with where to start troubleshooting this ?

Many thanks

Darius

[Cameron_Roberts]

Hi Darius,

Sorry to hear you are experiencing issues.  If I am reading your post correctly there was an issue but now it is resolved? Do the files in the temp cache all have the same creation date or around the same date? 

Thanks you,

Cameron

[Darius_Havenga]

Good morning Cameron

Thank you for the reply.

To answer your question if the issue is resolved, the answer is yes and no.....

What I meant by saying the service is running as normal, was referring to the windows service "Hyland Distribution Service" is running as normal, but the users did not receive mail notifications.

I have restarted the server before adding this post yesterday. The users now received all notifications generated yesterday, but not the 1000+ that is still in the cache folder.

In the cache folder, there are 13 sub folders labelled 0 to 12.

In folder 0 there are 118 items. All very old data (24 November 2017 to 18 January 2018) Can I manually delete this ?

Then folders 1 up to 9 contains nothing.

in Folder 10 there are exactly 1000 items, Dated 08 October 2019 to 10 October 2019

Folder 11 contains 985 items dated 10 October 2019 to 14 October 2019

Folder 12 is empty.

So it seems that new notifications are sent to the users. But there are notifications from last week still stuck in the cache folder.

[Cameron_Roberts · Accepted solution]

Good morning Darius,

OK I think I understand what the issue is. It sounds to me that the cloned VM came online and made an attempt at routing the messages but it was unable to reach the temp cache or SMTP server placing the messages in a retry status. Once an attempt to route a message is made by a machine that message has a possessing id entry added to the db and all subsequent attempts can only be made by that machine. This process allows for multiple instances of Distribution Service, more then 1 machine running Distribution Service against the same datasource, but in this case that is not the desired functionality. This can be confirmed by searching a few tables in customer's database but at this point I suggest you contact support for assistance. 

Thanks,

Cameron