I'm stuck looking at this problem that we've had since our last restart almost a week ago.
The distribution database is growing and no longer pruning; it appears that everything in the MSdistribution_history are all set to either 3 or 4 (in progress / idle) all the idle report as no replicated transactions are available)
We're now at 261K values in the history table and 195M rows in the repl_commands table
All replication through this distributor goes from one location to up to three different servers, there is currently a maximum of 4 seconds latency across all replication, cant see anything that isn't complete
Obviously running the sp_MSmaximum_cleanup_seqno command returns nothing as there is nothing that is set to be success (status 2)
Does anyone know what might have gone wrong or any possible solutions.
General Things:
- All replication is Transactional without any snapshots
- immediate_sync is turned off on all replication
- max retention is set to 72 hours
- no errors are being reported
- there were a few issues when the server came back up where all the jobs retried twice. -The Publisher server was patched from 2012_SP2_CU7 to SP3_CU2 and the Distributor instance has not yet been patched
We're going to try a fail over to the secondary node tomorrow to see if that will clear it out
I can always manually delete stuff from the repl_commands but I'm highly hesitant to do this.
Any advice or ideas?