Entries in Publishing Queue remain in status "Waiting for publish"

Question

Mostly every day we need to restart the Publisher services, because the items in the queue remain in a waiting for publish status.

This is resolved only by restarting the Publisher service. No errors are found in the event viewer.

Could anyone provide me a solution for this issue"?

Happening for us in Tridion 2013 SP1. We have single publisher and single broker db.

Answer 1

"Waiting for publish" means that the item was successfully added to the queue but no publisher service picked it up yet. Why can this happen?

1. Your publisher has other tasks that are keeping it busy right now. Change the publishing queue filters to see actions for all users (defaults to showing only YOUR actions)
2. Your publisher service stopped running (more details below)
3. Your publishing queue is so full of old transactions that it takes way to long for the publisher to process it (more below)

When your publisher stops running - or still shows as running but is inactive - there's a few things you need to check.

1. Did your database connection drop for a while? There's a reported issue with Oracle database clients that do not resume the connection automatically (like SQL server does) if a connection drops. Contact Customer Support, I believe there may be a fix for Tridion 2011, but not sure.
2. How often do you update statistics on your database and do you ever delete old transactions?
3. If this happens consistently, consider enabling publisher logging in the MMC Snap-In and/or running the publisher in debug mode to check for any unhealthy signs.

The thing to keep in mind here is that it is not normal for a Publisher to stop processing tasks, therefore something in your environment must be causing it.

Good luck!

Answer 2

We encounter the similar scenario quite a long time ago with SDL Tridion 2009. Whenever we publish a bunch of item (around 10 ~ 20) multiple times, then after some time the publisher service got stalled and after restarting it, the publishing starts working.

We have raised this Support and have a brainstorming session with them to resolve it. And the conclusion that came out is that it happening due to memory leak somewhere - either at the Tridion end or at our custom code (templating, extensions etc.)end.

We have done following in order to resolve it:

1. Set proper COM+ application recycling - we tried setting it to 512 MB
2. We analysed our code for templating, event system and deployer extension for any possible memory leak or for the part of the code which is prone to memory leak.
3. Most Important: Keep your publishing queue size small - we execute purge queue periodically to purge the publishing queue

This resolved our issue.

Answer 3

You can check fragmentation level of your db indexes,some of them may require reindexing.

Otherwise adding "sp_updatestats" to a scheduled job may solve your problem. I can not say scheduled job a good solution.So lets see if someone in community have any better solution.

Answer 4

Perhaps you could give more information about the architecture you have (number of publishers etc), amount of publishing, server, the size of the data being published etc.

If you are publishing in large volumes it could be worth looking at your environment in the following ways:

• Adding additional publishers to cope with high volume publishing
• Database maintenance tasks - schedule the sp_updatestates stored procedure, purging old content versions etc

It may also be possible that your templates are causing a lot of unnecessary publishing, for example you publish component X, which has dependencies on A,B,C, which in turn have dependencies, I've seen some extreme cases of this in the past too.