KB165158 - INF: How to Troubleshoot Communication Error 17824

Article ID: 165158

Article Last Modified on 11/21/2003

Microsoft SQL Server 6.0 Standard Edition
Microsoft SQL Server 6.5 Standard Edition

This article was previously published under Q165158

SUMMARY

In some circumstances, the following communication errors are logged in the SQL server error log:

Error : 17824, Severity: 10, State: 0
Unable to write to ListenOn connection '<servername>', loginname '<login
ID>', hostname '<hostname>'.
OS Error : 64, The specified network name is no longer available.

Error 1608 A network error was encountered while sending results to the front end

Other relevant errors may follow, depending on the network library used for the connection. In case of Named Pipes connections, errors "232 The pipe is being closed" or "109 The pipe has been ended" may be logged. In case of sockets based connections (TCP/IP or IPX/SPX), errors "10054 Connection reset by peer" or "10053 Software caused connection abort" may be logged.

These errors indicate that the connection between the client and SQL Server was broken for some reason while SQL Server was writing data to the front end. Depending on the circumstances, a certain number of these errors may be normal, and eliminating them is not always necessary. If you do not receive any end user complaints or experience general connection problems, you can ignore these errors.

MORE INFORMATION

Error 17824 "Unable to write to ListenOn connection" indicates that problems have occurred while SQL Server attempted to write to a client connection and failed. These communication problems may be caused by network problems, or if the client computer has stopped responding or been restarted. For more information regarding other communication errors, please refer to the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

109787 : INF: SQL Communication Errors 17832, 17824, 1608, 232, and 109

Error 17824 does not always indicate a network problem. The following are the most common situations under which the error 17824 is generated, along with the corresponding troubleshooting procedures.

This error may occur if the users are restarting their client computers if the application seems have stopped responding, so make sure they don't do that. It may be that the server is taking a longer time to process a long query. Once the client workstation is restarted, the connections are broken ungracefully. Later SQL Server tries to respond to the connection that has been dropped, and logs the message 17824.
The network may be unstable; make sure it is stable. You can check this by attempting to copy large files between the computer running Windows NT Server and the client computer. If this test fails, then you are running into problems with the physical network. Because the above errors indicate a potential network issue, it is recommended that you update the server, both Windows NT Server and SQL Server, to the latest service packs. Please check the knowledge base articles for more information on how to obtain the latest service packs for the Windows NT Server operating system and SQL Server. It is also recommended that you update the client components such as DB-Library, the ODBC driver, and network library to the latest DLLs. In case of client computers running 16-bit Windows 3.1 or Windows for Workgroups on a Novell network, it is necessary to obtain and install the latest MS-DOS and Windows drivers from Novell.
Error 17824 "Unable to write to ListenOn connection" may be a consequence of other errors that caused the connection to drop. Check the error logs for other errors within the same time frame as the 17824 error. If you find other errors, refer to SQL Server Books Online and the Microsoft Knowledge Base for more information on these errors.
Use sp_configure or the SQL Server Enterprise Manager to check the Priority Boost and the SMP Concurrency configuration settings. Make sure that these two configuration options are set to the default settings, because deviating from the default settings may cause error 17824 under some conditions.

For more information on why these settings may generate error 17824, please refer to the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

111405 : INF: SQL Server and Windows NT Thread Scheduling.
The error 17824 may be generated due to application problems. One major cause is running into a lock or block situation. In this case, a process holds a lock on a page or a table, and that lock is not released right away, due to an uncommitted transaction or a long query. This may cause all other processes requesting the same table to be blocked, and the client application to seem to stop responding. If the user then either uses 'End Task' to close the application or restarts the workstation, you may receive error 17824 on the server.

To find out if the application is causing a lock or block problem on the server, use the sp_who and sp_lock stored procedures when the client computers seem to stop responding or when the error 17824 starts to appear in the SQL Server error logs. If the client workstation has stopped responding, open a command-line ISQL connection on the server itself using the local pipe, and use these stored procedures to check for a blocking situation.

For more information on detecting and resolving blocking problems, please refer to the following article in the Microsoft Knowledge Base:

162361 : INF: Understanding and Resolving SQL Server Blocking Problems

If you have checked all of the above points and the problem still persists, contact SQL Server support for further troubleshooting assistance.

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