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Spooler Worker Count Limitation

Answered Spooler Worker Count Limitation

  • Monday, March 26, 2012 3:41 AM
     
     
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    I was researching a problem on our Remote Desktop Servers where the Spooler is intermittantly recording a 7011 event "A timeout (30000 milliseconds) was reached while waiting for a transaction response from the Spooler service." which causes applications to hang and I came across the following reply in the forums: Print Spooler service Problem in WIN2008R2 X64

    Can someone advise what does "There is a limitation to spooler and we seem to have reached the maximum worker count of 512." infer re mapping printers in a Remote Desktop Session?

    Does it mean that there can only be a total of 512 mapped printers in all sessions on a Remote Desktop Server, or does one printer have more than one worker thread and the total number of printers could be less?  Would this also include redirected client printers?

    jkv

     

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  • Tuesday, March 27, 2012 2:44 AM
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    Hi James,


    How many printers does the terminal users map at a time and do they map them for all the users at the same time?

    If RDS server mapping printers for all the users at the same time and the thread is opening 500+, this will lead to Spooler performance issues.

    In such circumstances, if restart the spooler service, then printing is restored and other services will start working normally. Fixing this issue may be only considered in Windows 8 or Windows 7/2008 R2 SP2.


    Please also refer to the following thread.
    Terminal Services 2008 Printing Error
    http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/winserverTS/thread/c0120107-d841-4949-8af1-d76fa0419fd7/



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  • Thursday, March 29, 2012 7:35 AM
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    Hi,

    Reduce the number of printer redirection, whether this issue is resolved or not? Looking forward to your feedback.

    Technology changes life……

     
  • Tuesday, April 10, 2012 2:06 AM
     
     
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    Thanks for your replies,

    Apologies for late response, I forgot to turn of alerting on this thread!

    We do not use printer redirection, all printers are mapped to our print server.

    An individual user will map between 2 and 25 printers depending on which office they are located in.   Each RDS usually has an average of 32 users logged on at any one time.  Potentially I would imagine that on any given server there could be between 10 and 25 users mapping 25 printers.

    Just to make sure I understand what you have said: "If RDS server mapping printers for all the users at the same time and the thread is opening 500+, this will lead to Spooler performance issues."  Do you mean if all users are logging in at the same time and mapping the printers then the 500+ threads will be opened?  If so I think this would not be the case as we have four RDS using load balancing.  It might occur that two or three people may log on at the same time.

    Or do you mean that there will be a large number of printers constantly mapped during the day therefore there may be 500+ threads open?

    I didn't mention in my first post that the timeout error occurs at different times of the day and not necessarily at times of peak logon activity (ie start of day).

    If we restart the Spooler when the timeout occurs, printing is restored to normal and applications don't hang.  We have scheduled a task to watch for the event and restart the Spooler automatically for us and as a workaround until we get a better solution this is working well.

    We are using Server 2008 R2 SP1 (I didn't realise there was an SP2 for 08 R2?) 

    I will read through the thread link you have supplied and get back to you.

    Thanks for your response Dollar

    jkv

     
  • Tuesday, April 10, 2012 3:03 AM
     
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    Hello James,

    As a best practices can you update the Print Spooler components with the update rollup package and see if that helps.

    http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-US;2647753

    Sanket. J Please remember to click “Mark as Answer” on the post that helps you, and to click “Unmark as Answer” if a marked post does not actually answer your question. This can be beneficial to other community members reading the thread.

     
  • Wednesday, April 11, 2012 5:44 AM
     
     
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    Hi Sanket

    We have couple of the hotfixes that the update rollup addresses installed already (during the server build)

    • KB982728
    • KB979681
    • KB2457866

    I read through the hotfixes the update contains and checked the registry key mentioned in KB2532459 - Print queue does not work if the queue is not one of the first 100 queues installed in a Windows Server 2008 or Windows Server 2008 R2 Terminal Services session. Though  user does not get this error message (popup messages have been suppressed in GPO), a users registry key does contain ports with the value: winspool,Ne-xx .  They also have ports for all printers, including printers that they aren't mapping to, and they also seem to have duplicates of the printers from different user session?

    And KB2388142 describes the symptoms if a user attempts to print when the spooler has timed out.

    I will install the update package and monitor the servers.

    Regards

    jkv


    • Edited by jameskv Wednesday, April 11, 2012 6:10 AM
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  • Tuesday, May 01, 2012 1:29 AM
     
     
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    Hi Sanket,

    We have had the Update Rollup installed now for a couple of weeks since the 15th April

    The 7011 event "A timeout (30000 milliseconds) was reached while waiting for a transaction response from the Spooler service." is still occuring but the frequency of the event occuring has appears to be occuring less often.

    Regards

    JKV

    jkv