In SharePoint, quiesce allows us to reduce the number of users that are connected and takes long running apps slowly offline. It prevents the loss of data. It is a very good practice when performing server maintenance. It has 3 statuses:
- Normal
- Quiescing
- Quiesced
Quiescing is when the connections are being reduced; when the status is Quiesced new connections aren't started. Not all features in sharePoint environment are affected when we Quiesce the farm. There are two features that make use of Quiescing: Microsoft Office InfoPath Forms Services (IPFS) and Microsoft Office Excel Services. Many other features and operations do not need to use Quisecing because they do not have long running sessions where users enter data over multiple server requests without having to save information. For instance, when editing an item in a SharePoint list, SharePoint handles that in a single transaction to the database, storing the information. However, in IPFS, a form filling session may require several communications with a server as the form posts back for server-side data processing for operations such as view switching. Data from the session is usually not saved until the finish when a user submits or saves the form that he or she is filling.
If an administrator takes the farm offline while some users were already filling it out, the users would lose all of the data gathered so far in their session. Therefore, if an administrator is going to bring the farm offline, in order to preserve their customer data, they would first quiesce the farm. This prevents new requests from coming in to start filling out new forms, but it allows existing form filling sessions to continue. When the sessions are all completed, or when an administrator-specified time elapses, the farm enters the quiesced state where no new requests are accepted. The farm can then be safely taken offline at this point without causing any data loss to the users.
- In Central Administration, under Operations you'll find the Quiecse feature for SharePoint.
- Enter the time-period that our farm should be quiescing, and click on the Start button. It will start the process, and will be fully quiesced at the end of the time span.
- When your farm is done with its maintenance period, you can un-quiesce the farm by clicking on the Reset Farm button.