Friday, March 16, 2007

rsInternalError - Now This One's a Doozy...!

If you're running Reporting Services and keep getting random rsInternalErrors that may or may not return errors in the logs concerning things like "There is no data for the field at position n", before you start to rip apart your reports looking for bugs check the make of the processors on your server.

There is a little problem-ette that manifests itself as these kind of errors when you have AMD processors in your machine. We have 2 servers on a clients site that have the 64bit Opteron chips in that were both demonstrating these errors with different reports, data sources and pretty much anything you can imagine. After a little hunt around the information hyper global mega net we found some newsgroup postings points to this Microsoft knowledge base article.

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/895980/en-us

Adding the /usepmtimer switch in the boot.ini file appears, for now, to have cured the problem that was causing very simple reports to fail 20-30% of the time on an under stressed production server.

After my recent problems with SSIS 64bit this was the last thing I needed but suffice to say my cup of joy was overflowing as a dev server that pretty much gave me an rsInternalError on command has worked flawlessly for several hours. If anything changes I'll be sure to mention it.

1 comment:

si said...

THANK YOU! (and thank you Google)

Was hitting the same random obscure problem and sure enough, server CPU was AMD 64bit and setting /usepmtimer seemed to have fixed the problem.