Why is the storage for MSMQ full when the queues themselves are empty?

Question

A QA server of mine which has not given me any flack for a while started giving my applications errors because they could not write to a queue. MSMQ specifically threw a message saying "Insufficient resources to perform operation".

A check of the queues themselves indicate that they are empty, with zero messages each.

A check of the limits says that we're limiting them to 1GB of storage each.

A check of the directory where the storage is occurring says that yes, there is 1GB of files in there and therefore it makes sense that there's no more resources.

However, the queues themselves are empty. Why would it not purge old files? What setting am I missing here? I would think they would empty themselves on a reboot but that didn't fix it either.

Answer 1

Have you journal enabled on your queues and if so what size do you limit them too? It's at the bottom of the General tab of the queue. These would not be deleted on reboot. If you've a very large number of queues, the default limit of 1 mb for journals might catch you.