Role cannot be reached by the host system Azure- WorkerRole

Question

I'm using the Worker Role machines (Medium -> 2 Cores with 3,5 GB of Ram) to do massive work, and I'm able to use 100% of the CPU (of both cores) and 85% of RAM.

During this work, each takes around 20 minutes/ 40 minutes the Azure thinks the machine is unhealthy and stops all my work. In the Portal I see my worker instance are getting the message "Waiting for the status (Role cannot be reached by the host system).

Can anyone know a work around that doesn't include: 1) Use a more power full Role with cores that I will not use 2) Try to reduce the CPU usage by my application (100% CPU usage is what we want to use)

Thanks in advance Rui

Answer 1

try this:

Thread.CurrentThread.Priority = ThreadPriority.BelowNormal

maybe some other things(processes, threads) need lower priority's also but this should keep the cpu utilization at 100%

for (external) processes start them with the following code(this is vb but you should be able to covert it to your language

Dim myprocess As New System.Diagnostics.Process() 
myprocess.StartInfo.FileName = "C:\the\path\to\the\the\process.exe" 
myprocess.Start() 
myprocess.PriorityClass = ProcessPriorityClass.BelowNormal

you could set the priority of the current process of the worker role but this might be dependent of other processes so watch out, its better to set the priority of the demanding process lower this won't slow it down unless there is other work to be proformed

Process.GetCurrentProcess().PriorityClass = ProcessPriorityClass.AboveNormal

Answer 2

This is something that is affecting a service I'm running in a Windows Azure as well. I have just tried manually setting the Priority of WaAppAgent to High. Hopefully that helps.

But really this is shouldn't be my problem. Sometimes my database is running at 100% CPU and really this is the WORST possible time for a restart.

I really don't want to over provision resources just so some heart beat will be happy. Do the VM instances have a heart beat event as well? Maybe the solution is to switch to using a VM instead of using a PaaS role?