External (.NET) RFC Call didn't return an answer

[Former Member]

Dear Friends,

We are in our final ‘sprint’ for our Go Live (schedule to 1st of November) and, during some stress tests, fount a RFC Communication problem in our development system, and would like your help to find the possible cause for this error and, with it, to be sure that this problem will not occur again in our Production System.

I’ll try to be shortly, but I think that is very important first to explain our scenario.

We’ve some external systems to control, for example, the Production Shop Floor. The integration scenario are using IDOCs for outbound data and BAPIs and RFCs for inbound data. Between the R3 and the external systems, we’ve the Microsoft EAI Application (Biztalk). Biztalk has one adapter, certified by SAP, called ‘SAP Adapter’. Biztalk SAP Adapter uses the ‘SAP .NET Connector’ to establish the communication with R/3. Resuming, our integration scenario is:

External Systems <> Biztalk (SAP .NET Connector) <> R/3

We don’t have any kind of problem for outbound data (IDOCs). Our problem is related just with inbound data (BAPIs / RFCs).

Now that you already have an idea of our integration scenario, let’s go for our problem.

We’ve a lot of BAPIs and RFCs that was called from Biztalk. We already made unitary tests for all interfaces and had success in 100%.

When we start with our integrated test and, with it, the number of calls for BAPIs and RFCs had a high increase, we are having an intermittent error with the RFC calls. In some cases, and it’s important to repeat that is intermittent, the RFC call was made, the answer never come back and even. As we do not have any return from

SAP, the application that called the RFC don’t know what they need to do.

I already search for a lot of notes, try to find something at gateway trace, but the problem still happening, intermittent but still, and I still too without an idea of what can I do.

It’s important to say that this problem just occurred, until now, in our test environment.

The only ‘strange’ fact that I fount, and I really don’t know if it could be the reason of our RFC Intermittent Problem, is the entry for the gateway (TA SMGW) that has been establish between Biztalk and R3.

In our development system, the gateway appear with ‘Dummy’ at TP Name. We checked in our production system (E05) and, with exactly the same configuration between Biztalk and R/3 (we already checked hosts, services, kernel version, etc), the entry at SMGW appear

with ‘BTSNTSvc’ at TP Name. You probably don’t know but the ‘BTNTSvc’ is the name of the Biztalk service that start the communication with R3. Following one example of the ‘strange’ entry at SMGW in our development system:

LU name vogsp999 vide0301

TP Name Dummy sapgw03

Host name vogsp999 vide0301

Host address 200.185.24.77 200.185.117.35

Syst.type NORMAL_CLIENT LOCAL_R3

Number 212 0

I’ll be very thankful if someone here can help us to solve this issue.

Regards,

Gustavo Kauffman

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

As this seems to be happening at "random" let me ask a few questions:

[list=1][*]Do you have any logon groups defined for RFC? and are you using them?

[*]Did anybody check the RFC load on the apps servers in the RFC group and the distribution of the RFC load across the app servers?

[*]Can you exclude that it was a network problem? In other words how stable is your network?

[*]Last and not least... are all your calls (BAPI) transactional?

[/list]

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Dear Friend,

First of all thanks a lot for your reply.

Answering your questions:

x I don't have a logon group definied for RFC;

x I think that your second question was not relevant because I'm not using RFC group, am I right?

x We made a lot of tests (NIPING, etc) with our network and didn't found problems. The strange fact is that the call from .Net application still active without an answer. Even if we'd some network problem, I think that R3 should try to send back a message or, at least, an exception, am I wrong?

x Yes, we're mading synchrounous calls for BAPIs, RFCs and custom BAPIs.

Thanks again for your help!

Gustavo

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Hi,

we are having similar problems - periodic timeouts. Did you or anyone else manage to solve what was going on?

thanks

[Former Member · Accepted solution]

Dear Friend,

Unfortunately I still with the problem...

Rgs