930567 - Overview: Jobs remain in status "ready" for a long time

Symptom

The system displays background jobs in transaction SM37 in the status "ready" and they do not start.

Other Terms

Status, ready, wait, background job

Reason and Prerequisites

Jobs remaining in the status "ready" is not the normal system response. If you use transaction SM65 to perform a status check or a consistency check, you may eliminate the symptoms. However, it is essential to eliminate the cause of the problem, mainly because it occurs frequently.

If the resource check finds a free work process for a background job that is to be executed, the system sets the status of this job to "ready" and then uses the dispatcher to send a start message. In the normal situation, a background work process receives this message immediately and it then sets the status to "running".

If a problem occurs during sending or receiving, the status of the job remains as "ready" and the system no longer executes it. Possible reasons for this system response are as follows:

1. The system cannot send the message on (rare).

2. The receiving background work process does not have a data connection and, therefore, it cannot change the status of the job (frequent).

3. The receiving background work process repeatedly restarts due to a different error (rare).

Solution

Perform the following steps to determine the cause of the problem:

1. Check for error messages in the system log (transaction SM21), the dispatcher trace file (dev_disp), and the trace files for the background work processes. In the "Executing Server" field in transaction SM37, the system displays the name of the instance that processed or that is to process the affected job.

2. In the system log (transaction SM21) and the trace files for the background work processes, check for error messages that refer to problems with the database connection. In the "Executing Server" field in transaction SM37, the system displays the name of the instance that processed the affected job.

3. In the system log (transaction SM21) and the trace files for the background work processes, check for error messages that show that the process restarted.

You can use the status check in transaction SM37 either to set the status of the affected jobs to "scheduled" or to restart the job.

Attached to this note are other notes that describe known reasons why the jobs have the status "ready".

Header Data

Released On	09.12.2008 13:56:26
Release Status	Released for Customer
Component	BC-CCM-BTC Background Processing
Priority	Recommendations / Additional Info
Category	Help for error analysis

Validity

This document is not restricted to a software component or software component version

References

This document refers to:

SAP Notes

1057255		Jobs remain in status 'ready'
165084		Why does my job not start?
599127		Archive jobs hang in 'ready' status since Support Package
604448		Problems in creating or starting jobs (composite SAP note)
628865		Job hangs with 'ready' status
636854		Jobs remain in the 'Ready' status for a long time
662463		Immediate start: Job does not start
739968		Jobs hang in status 'released' or 'ready'
785239		Job remains in 'Ready' status: Message Q0J, Q0G in Syslog.
809888		Jobs with names in other code pages do not start

This document is referenced by:

SAP Notes (1)

165084

Why does my job not start?