replication - agent is suspect

I setup a client with merge replication, the following error was
returned after working successfully for a day "The agent is suspect.
No response within the last 10 minutes". Most research I found on
the newsgroup is this error does not stop merge replication from
working, but in my case it did stop replication from working. I was
able to get to working again by running the following command.
sp_replication_agent_checkup @.heartbeat_interval = 6000
Can anybody explain why replication stopped working altogether with the
agent is suspect message, and what can I do to avoid this message to
begin with?
Thank you,
Pauly C
Suspect means that the agent hasn't communicated with the job subsystem in
the interval defined in the heartbeat_interval.
The job will be failed after the heartbeat_interval has passed, but I am not
exactly sure when.
The agent could be busy, dead, or trying to connect. Run profiler on the
subscriber to try to figure out what is going on. Profiler might not reveal
anything. There is a condition when the publisher or subscriber has
exhausted buffers and hangs on initialization. You can clear this by
rebooting.
Hilary Cotter
Director of Text Mining and Database Strategy
RelevantNOISE.Com - Dedicated to mining blogs for business intelligence.
This posting is my own and doesn't necessarily represent RelevantNoise's
positions, strategies or opinions.
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"paulysc" <paulysc@.optonline.net> wrote in message
news:1141228700.833217.245870@.t39g2000cwt.googlegr oups.com...
>I setup a client with merge replication, the following error was
> returned after working successfully for a day "The agent is suspect.
> No response within the last 10 minutes". Most research I found on
> the newsgroup is this error does not stop merge replication from
> working, but in my case it did stop replication from working. I was
> able to get to working again by running the following command.
> sp_replication_agent_checkup @.heartbeat_interval = 6000
> Can anybody explain why replication stopped working altogether with the
> agent is suspect message, and what can I do to avoid this message to
> begin with?
> Thank you,
> Pauly C
>
|||I saw this error message if the job runs against a wrong database. In my
case, the Queue Reader was running against the master database, not the
distribution, which resulted to the same error message as yours.
hope it helps,
FJY
"paulysc" wrote:

> I setup a client with merge replication, the following error was
> returned after working successfully for a day "The agent is suspect.
> No response within the last 10 minutes". Most research I found on
> the newsgroup is this error does not stop merge replication from
> working, but in my case it did stop replication from working. I was
> able to get to working again by running the following command.
> sp_replication_agent_checkup @.heartbeat_interval = 6000
> Can anybody explain why replication stopped working altogether with the
> agent is suspect message, and what can I do to avoid this message to
> begin with?
> Thank you,
> Pauly C
>