Max Retry Attempts

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Chris
New member
Username: Chrisc

Post Number: 29
Registered: 12-2008
Posted on Wednesday, February 17, 2010 - 08:52 am:   

Hi guys

We've been having a few issues with messages being constantly retried in our message queues, a few of which have gone as high as 62 retry attempts.

However, when looking at the SMSGW.ini file, we can see the RetryMaxAttempts value is set to 5.

Is there anything else we need to enter into the file to avoid excessively high retries such as this?

Please advise

Regards
Chris
Des - NowSMS Support
Board Administrator
Username: Desosms

Post Number: 1809
Registered: 08-2008
Posted on Wednesday, February 17, 2010 - 03:58 pm:   

Hi Chris,

I assume this is an SMPP environment, correct?

There are two SMPP error codes which are considered more "temporary" errors, and do not trigger RetryMaxAttempts.

These two error codes are ESME_RTHROTTLED and ESME_RMSGQFUL.

ESME_RTHROTTLED is a throttling error that is returned when the SMSC says that you are submitting messages too fast.

ESME_RMSGQFUL is defined as "receive message queue full". What exactly this means seems to differ by provider.

It can be a system wide message indicating that the outbound message queue at the provider is too full, and they will not accept any more messages until they can deliver some of the pending messages.

It can be a user account specific message indicating that the provider still has too many messages submitted by your account that are pending delivery, and it will not accept any more messages from you until it can deliver some of the pending messages.

It can also indicate that there are too many pending messages for the specified recipient on the provider system. We've seen systems where if there is one message queued for the recipient, this error is returned until the first message can be delivered, causing problems sending more than one message to a recipient.

Over the years, we've run into a lot of confusing issues with this ESME_RMSGQFUL error, because of its potential different meanings.

As a result, different retry rules apply for ESME_RTHROTTLED and ESME_RMSGQFUL. Instead of expiring after RetryMaxAttempts, additional retries are allowed, up to RetryMaxAge minutes. By default, RetryMaxAge is 1440 minutes (or 24 hours).

You can use the RetryMaxAge parameter to lower the number of retry attempts on these messages.

But before you do this, try to get a better understanding of why your upstream provider is returning this error code.

--
Des
NowSMS Support