Backup hangs in wait-state MSSEARCH

I'm experiencing a very annoying failure when trying to do a backup - I hope you can help where others (including me) have failed.

The setup is a SharePoint Portal Server 2003 version 11.0.8126.0 running on Windows server 2003 Standard edition Service pack 1; it has a SQL-server 2005 version 9.0.2047 running on Windows server 2003 Standard edition Service pack as a back-end.

When I issue a backup of the SharePoint database XXX_SITE which holds round 4 gb. of data (mainly documents) the backup process hangs with a Wait Type 'MSSEARCH', it makes no difference whether I issue it as a single job, or through a maintenance plan.

I tried to stop the MsSearch service on the SharePoint-server, and disabled the Full-Text search on the database but it makes no difference.

The only way I can get a backup is to reboot the server on which SQL-server resides (restarting the SQL-server makes it rather unstable), and do a manual back-up shortly after.

Kim,

This is very likely a bug. I suggest you contact Microsoft support.

Regards,

Matt Hollingsworth

Sr. Program Manager

Microsoft SQL Server

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That wait state indicates problems communicating between SQL and the MSSEARCH service via the COM interface.

There were several known problems that would lead to this situation which have been fixed in SP1, so that might be of help.

The quick solution is to cycle the MSSEARCH service, which should get backups moving.

If you're on SP1, and have this problem frequently, we can work with you to see what's going on. Event Viewer events about COM errors would be the first place to look.

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Hi Kevin,

We are on SP1, and the oddest thing is that I've disabled MSSEARCH (stopped the process) on the SharePoint server.

The Occurrence is highly frequent i.e. if there has been any user activity on the database the Backup hangs.

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I'm assuming that you have fulltext catalogs in your database?

So, for SQL 2005, the service is msftesql. If it is disabled, the backup should ignore the fulltext catalogs.

If we can get a dump for sqlservr.exe and msftesql.exe process together with all errorlog and SQLFT*.LOG file, I can take a look and see what is the problem. Feel free to contact me offline @. kevin.farlee@.microsoft.com

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Hi! Yes we did have full text catalogues in the database, but since I had disabled full text search for the database, and disabled msftesql, I didn't suspect them. I got however an article from Microsoft support, showing me how I could test for catalogues not properly removed. So I discovered that there still existed an old catalogue, which I ,after and only after re-enabling full text search, were able to delete, since then my backup has worked :0}

Thanks for the all the good will shown in these forums.

Kim Brandt Jensen