OMW - How to avoid delays where message forwarding is enabled

It happens quite often that, in environment where OMW (Operations Manager for Windows) is configured to forward messages to other servers such as another OMW, OMU or OMi, from time to time there are delays when the amount of messages to be processed and delivered is high or when the the targer server is unreachable.
This issue has been analyzed and solved in the following Change Request:

http://support.microfocus.com/kb/kmdoc.php?id=LID/QCCR1A153531

The link above shows the information about the patches where the fix for this problem has been introduced:

OMW_00170 for OMW 9.00 - http://support.microfocus.com/kb/kmdoc.php?id=FID/DOCUMENTUM_OMW_00170
OMW_00169 for OMW 8.1x - http://support.microfocus.com/kb/kmdoc.php?id=FID/DOCUMENTUM_OMW_00169

Please be aware of these patches has now been superseded. As the patches are cumulative, please install the latest one as it contains the mentioned hotfix above.

In addition to this, another server setting helps in this kind of scenario. The setting is called “Send directly to HTTPS targets” an can be found under the "Server-based Flexible Management" namespace in the Server Configuration Editor. 

The default value for this setting is TRUE and this means that requests are directly sent to HTTPS in this case. Only if the target is not reachable requests are buffered on disk. However, if you have many unreachable targets, the timed-out forward operation might cause a message delay. In such a case set this value to FALSE - requests are buffered on disk before delivery.

And the recommendation is to set it to FALSE. With this in place, the messages/operations to be forwarded will not be sent directly to the target servers but will be placed first into queues (one queue per target server). Then dedicated threads (uncoupled from the message queue) will process these queues.

NOTE: it is advisable to make sure that the sizes for these forwarding queues are configured large enough. The variables for these settings are in the same namespace and they are:

• "Forwarding queue size maximum (in megabytes)"
• "Forwarding queue size warning threshold (in megabytes)"
• "Forwarding retry interval"