How to recover when the SAP spool is full

As an SAP Administrator you first notice that for some reason it is taking a long time to create spool requests. Next, users begin calling and saying that nothing is printing out of SAP.

SAP Error Messages: Spool Full or Spool Overflow

To diagnose the problem, you make a quick check in SP01 which shows that SAP isn’t creating any more spool requests. Soon you discover that SAP is slowing down and transaction SM50 reveals that all of your dialog processes are full.

You begin checking the system log using transaction SM21 and immediately notice that there are error messages such as short dumps “SPOOL_INTERNAL_ERROR” and“Spool full” or “Spool Overflow”.

SAP Spool request limits

As with everything in SAP, there are limits to the number of spool requests that can be created. The standard SAP system has a limit of 32000. When this limit is reached, the above error messages occur because there are no more free numbers available. This situation can obviously causes panic for end users.

Resolving the “SAP Spool full” issue

To resolve this problem as quickly as possible and get SAP to resume printing, there are basically two solutions that you need to implement.

1. First you need to run the SAP programs RSP00041 or RSP01041 to delete and free up spool request numbers for new spool requests. Select the appropriate number of days to keep for each spool type and execute. This step should quickly delete any spool requests that are no longer needed. Rather quickly this will allow new spool requests to be created and printing will be restored to normal.

2. Second, you should look at increasing the spool request limit. Use transactionSNRO while logged in to client 000 and adjust the upper limit of interval SPO_NUM. The value can be increased up to 999,999 but is really dependent upon the capacity of the database and the host computer.

Making sure you don’t run out of spool request numbers

To make sure that this error doesn’t surprise you again, make sure that you schedule program RSP00041 in a batch process. If it is already scheduled, then make sure that you adjust the variant so that it has the proper values. This way you can ensure that there will be enough spool requests available so that you don’t run out before the next time the batch process runs.

Monitoring the Spool Number

You can use transaction RZ20 to monitor the spool number. If the system ever reaches the specified threshold values an alert will be created to notify you of the problem before your users begin calling.

SAP Notes:.

Additional information about this specific problem can be found in SAPNotes.  

SAPNote: 48284 – System can no longer create spool requests

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