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SharePoint 2010: The timer service failed to recycle

Problem

You find the following entry in the SharePoint 2010 Central Administration Review problems and solutions listing:

Title The timer service failed to recycle.
Severity 2 - Warning
Category Performance
Explanation The last attempt to recycle the timer service failed as have most of the other attempts during the past week. Recycling typically fails because other timer jobs are running when the recycle is scheduled. To view which jobs blocked the recycle view the history for the recycle job and click on the failed status link for more information. The error message for the failed job entry will contain a list of jobs that were still running. The history for the recycle job can be found at: [path to timer job history for the associated timer job]
Remedy Change the schedule for the timer recycle job so that it does not conflict with other long-running timer jobs. This can be done from the central administration site at [path to timer job history for the associated timer job].  For more information about this rule, see "http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkID=142615".
Failing Servers [server name list]
Failing Services SPTimerService (SPTimerV4)
Rule Settings View

 

Troubleshooting

  1. Navigated to the timer job history to review the list of instances that failed. 

  2. Clicked the Failed status link and saw the following error message:

    The timer service was not recycled because the following jobs were still running: Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Usage Data Import.

  3. Navigated to: CA > Monitoring > Timer Job Status, Job Definition: Timer Service Recycle, View: Job Definition.  Saw the following for this job: 

    1. Scheduled to run daily @ 6PM on all farm servers
    2. Duration : 00:10:30.

  4. Navigated to: CA > Monitoring > Timer Job Status, Job Definition: Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Usage Data Import, View: Job Definition.  Saw the following details for this job: 

    1. Scheduled to run every 30 minutes on all farm servers
    2. Duration: varies between 6 and 9 hours
    3. Progress has been stuck at 0% for all farm servers for many hours.

  5. Reviewed this job's history: when first started, completed in 2-3 hours.  Now, two weeks later, completes in 6-9 hours.  Steady increases in duration logged over this period.

Solution

  1. At next maintenance window, bounced servers (for other maintenance as well).  This effectively restarted the SharePoint 2010 Timer service
  2. Durations had reached 11+ hours for Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Usage Data Import jobs on all servers.
  3. Reviewed job history for Microsoft SharePoint Foundation Usage Data Import:
    1. Durations dropped from over 11 hours down to minutes.
      1. Application Server: few minutes
      2. WFE1: several minutes
      3. WFE2: 10+ minutes.
    2. Difference between WFEs is interesting.  Will need to research this.
  4. Manually started Timer Service Recycle job
  5. Checked Timer Service Recycle job history several hours later:
    1. Succeeded for all servers.
  6. Reopened issue, and then clicked Reanalyze Now.
  7. Checked report a few minutes later:
    1. Issue gone.

This is only a temporary solution until I can get the machines patched through December 2013 CU, which, according to one of the references below, is one solution to this problem.

UPDATE: I performed several test farm deployments on Windows Server 2012 VMs, each time updating the binaries through the December 2013 CU. So far, I have not had the timer recycle issue appear once for any test farm deployment. Additionally, my 2013 dev farm (also updated through December 2013 CU) has been up since February 2014 and has not presented this issue to date. Thus, it would appear that the December 2013 CU resolved the timer recycle issue.

Notes

  • Server OS: Windows 2008 R2
  • SharePoint Farm patch level: 14.0.6123.5000
  • Verified that KB2775511 not installed on server

References

See Also

An important place to find a huge amount of SharePoint related articles is the TechNet Wiki itself. The best entry point is SharePoint Resources on the TechNet Wiki.