Paul Schaeflein, of Barracuda Tools, has written a very nice extension to stsadm.exe. Instead of re-writing the explanation, I have copied and pasted from his install file. This is an awesome tool that was written at the request of Mindsharp Instructors and Architects. It is free, but you must download from mindsharp's Premium Content area https://mindsharp.com/Default.aspx?premium=Default
Thanks, Paul!
Full Scoop:
One common pain point for SharePoint administrators is the Windows SharePoint Services Timer Service, also known as OWSTIMER.EXE. The Timer Service is responsible for executing several processes that are part of the product. A few of the more well-known processes are the search crawl refresh, recycle bin processing and the workflow processes. Also, the Timer Service is the process that SharePoint uses to push web.config modifications and solutions to all front end servers in the farm.
Two specific issues that are related to the Timer Service are its memory consumption and limited user interface. The Application Extension Download for SharePoint (AED for SharePoint) from Barracuda is designed to help system administrators deal with these issues.
OWSTIMER Issue: Memory Leak
Often the OWSTIMER.EXE process will allocate significant amounts of memory (known as a memory leak). As more and more memory is allocated to OWSTIMER, less is available for other processes, most notably the Internet Information Server (IIS) web service (W3SVC). If IIS does not have sufficient memory, a serious performance penalty will result. The work around for this memory leak is to stop and then start the OWSTIMER process. This can be accomplished using the built-in Services application (under Administrative Programs in the Start menu) or via the command line. (The command-line entry is "
net stop WSSTimerV3".) In a large farm deployment, the service will be running on many different servers, so the work around must be performed on all of them.
The AED for SharePoint extends the STSADM command with a new operation: RESTARTTIMER. The Restart Timer operation will perform the work around on all servers in a farm. If necessary, the work around can be targeted to, or excluded from, specific servers.
Limited User Interface
The jobs that are run by the timer service are called Timer Jobs. SharePoint Central Administration provides a page to view the status of timer jobs that have recently run. There is also a Central Administration page to view the job definitions. The job definition page allows updates to the job title and provides for disabling the job. The schedule of the job is not displayed in either of these pages.
Just as the Central Administration page allows filtering by service and web application, the ENUMTIMERJOBS operation will display the job definitions for the specified service or web application. The -schedule argument will include the job’s schedule.
The service/web application name combined with the job name will uniquely identify a timer job. With this information, the AED for SharePoint will allow the job to be run outside of the schedule. This is called a forced execution. To force a job to run, use the STARTTIMERJOB operation.
Installation
The SharePoint AED from Barracuda is delivered as a Windows SharePoint Services Solution package (.wsp). The package must be added to the solution store using the STSADM command, addsolution operation. Once the solution is added, it must be deployed. The deployment can be performed via the command line or the Solution Management page in Central Administration.
Ben Curry
http://mindsharpblogs.com/ben