MSMQ: What can cause a "Insufficient resources to perform operation" error when receiving from a queue?

I had the same error message and the solution was simple.

There were a lot of messages sitting on various queues, and the storage limits had been reached. I went to:

• Server Manager -> Features

• Right clicked on Message Queuing

• Selected properties

• In the General tab un-ticked the storage limits

I was informed that services using MSMQ would be re-started, and then the error went away.

From John Breakwell's Blog there are eleven possibilities:

1. The thread pool for the remote read is exhausted (MSMQ 2.0 only).
2. The number of local callback threads is exceeded
3. The volume of messages has exceeded what the system can handle (MSMQ 2.0 only).
4. Paged-pool kernel memory is exhausted.
5. Mismatched binaries.
6. The message size is too large.
7. The machine quota has been exceeded.
8. Routing problems when opening a transactional foreign queue (MSMQ 3.0 only)
9. Lack of disk space.
10. Storage problems on mobile devices
11. Clustering too many MSMQ resources
12. Too many open connections
13. Computer name was longer than 15 characters
14. Too many messages in the dead letter queue

http://blogs.msdn.com/johnbreakwell/archive/2006/09/18/761035.aspx

I would check the version of your queue and the amount of connections (to and from) your queue open at the time of error. Any of those "could have" caused your error.

I had too many failed messages in my outgoing queue. Check System Queues -> Dead-letter messages. I cleared this queue out and it worked fine again.