Package Time Outs

Okay, we have are running our Master Package (and therefore all related Child packages) through a .bat file. The .bat file is scripted using the following logic for an entire month of daily runs:

Code Snippet

DTExec /FILE E:\ETL\FinancialDataMart\Master.dtsx /DECRYPT masterpwd /SET \Package.Variables[ReportingDate].Value;"2/01/2007" > E:\ETL\ErrorLogs\Processing\etl_20070201log.txt
IF NOT %ERRORLEVEL%==0 GOTO ERROR%ERRORLEVEL%
mkdir E:\ETL\ErrorLogs\Archive\20070201
move E:\ETL\ErrorLogs\Processing\*.txt E:\ETL\ErrorLogs\Archive\20070201

DTExec /FILE E:\ETL\FinancialDataMart\Master.dtsx /DECRYPT masterpwd /SU /SET \Package.Variables[ReportingDate].Value;"2/02/2007" > E:\ETL\ErrorLogs\Processing\etl_20070202log.txt
IF NOT %ERRORLEVEL%==0 GOTO ERROR%ERRORLEVEL%
mkdir E:\ETL\ErrorLogs\Archive\20070202
move E:\ETL\ErrorLogs\Processing\*.txt E:\ETL\ErrorLogs\Archive\20070202

etc...

Generally it takes about 40-45 minutes to run one days worth of data. However, we have found unpredictable instances where the job will take 3 hours or even 6 hours and appear to hang....

The weirdness sets in when we kill the job and rerun it. In all instances of a rerun, the job will execute in the normal 40-45 minute time frame. Obviously, we would like to institute some sort of logging, monitoring and error handling....including if need be a method to timeout a process and restart it.

I am reviewing the WMI (Windows Management Instrumentation) Task but I'm not entirely convinced that it's the right tool for the job.

Questions:

Has anyone else experienced the type of processing behavior that I described? Has anyone been successful at using WMI or another process to monitor and timeout packages? If so, are there sample packages or a good tutorial that maps it out? Unrelated to this issue, we also have instances incomplete processing logs. The logs don't finish writing and the weird part is that they all end at the same point, does anyone have experience with incomplete job logs?:

Code Snippet

Progress: 2007-06-20 12:46:49.87
Source: Update factFinancial Data Flow
Cleanup: 11% complete

Thanks in advance!

Sounds like you're encountering some sort of deadlock. It's not clear to me whether or not you've enabled logging in all the packages; have you?

Have you installed SP2? We added some more logging in SP2 around calls to external databases.

You shouldn't need to kill the packages, but if you really, really want to go that way, you could use a Execute Process tasks (calling DTExec) instead of the Execute Package tasks, and set the TimeOut TerminateProcessAfterTimeout properties.