Scheduled Archiving Running outside of Schedule or Inconsistent

[Bruce_Crankshaw]

Hi All
I have an anomaly in respect to the above
I have 2 EV servers ,EV 8.0 SP3 ,that are configured to Run various Mailbox Archiving tasks from 11pm-5 am
The issue I am seeing is very inconsistent behavior around when the tasks actually run
On one server the tasks nearly always run out of the Archive Window and the other server they run sometimes or not at all
I can track this by using Event Viewer and looking for the 3156 event where the task actually processes an Exchange Server.
Has anyone some ideas about what could be causing this inconsistency or advice on how I can troubleshoot this problem considering the fact it is intermittent
Another observation is there are constant messages building and dropping   up in the A5 queue ,Mailboxes to Process .Im not sure  if this would cause the task to not process and log the 3156 event
Thx

[JesusWept3]

messages being posted and removed from the A5 or really any of the queues is expected behavior. The A5 is a process mailbox request for the archiving task to pick up, and it doesn't mean that as soon as its empty the archive task will stop, it means that the queue will fill up again with mailboxes that still have items to process past the 1000 messages per pass. Your issue could be something like read only mode. but usually the archiving schedules are fairly rigid, so what i would suggest at is looking at the site schedule vs the individual schedule on the task, as you may have set the tasks schedule to be different to the other archiving task

[Bruce_Crankshaw]

@ Jesuswept2

Thanks for the response
I have confirmed that the Schedule is set for the Site ,which is Mon-Fri 11pm-5 am and the whole day for Saturday and Sunday
I have also seen something else which may be the issue

Okay during the weekend the 7 mailbox archiving tasks  don't always  start with the 3156 event until about 6 hours after the schedule ,this is intermittent but happens more than often
My question is this
At the time of the schedule are all tasks suppose to initialize more or less together or does EV wait for the first task to start  before others kick-off
I doubt the latter is correct as I have never seen this before at other sites ...what seems to be happening here is the tasks take long time to start processing once the schedule starts  ...any ideas what could cause that ? 

[JesusWept3]

honestly, you may be best off creating a case for this one, unless its something obvious like time zones for the machines are different or something

[Bruce_Crankshaw]

@ Jesuswept
Thanks ,makes sense due to the nature of this issue

[Bruce_Crankshaw · Accepted solution]

Hi All
Just an update around this
I deleted and recreated all the Mailbox Archiving tasks and now they run according to the schedule
Thanks