Content Deployment Error – There is no web named "".

Content deployment seems to be one of those topics that a lot of people tend to avoid, this is most likely because it has a whole host of nuances and subtleties that can make it seem buggy or unusable.

In the spirit of documenting the little quirks of content deployment, here is one I encountered just this week. 

The Execute method of job definition Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Administration.ContentDeploymentJobDefinition (ID d3d7ac13-f785-4f03-8a73-88505cf6ec7b) threw an exception. More information is included below.

There is no Web named "".

I coaxed this error out from a failing content deployment job after chasing wild geese in the form of two error messages :

Publishing: Content deployment job failed. Error: 'System.ArgumentOutOfRangeException: The specified indexer value for this collection could not be found or is not unique.
Parameter name: jobId

and

The Execute method of job definition Microsoft.SharePoint.Publishing.Administration.ContentDeploymentJobDefinition (ID ac28b255-0933-4ba0-9458-20bf97f6fcf9) threw an exception. More information is included below.

The specified indexer value for this collection could not be found or is not unique.
Parameter name: jobId

Getting past those two errors was simply restarting the WSS Search and Office Search services via Services, and then starting them up again via Stsadm.  Immediately after this upon the next content deployment push I saw the initial error message with "There is no web named """.

The cause of the message was the transaction log on the database running out of space.  I have seem this happen before if the content deployment push is a large one, in one case we saw the transaction log blow out to over 50 gigabytes in less than an hour.

In this particular case it was because the transaction log was set to autogrow with a maximum size of 6 gigabytes.  As soon as the transaction log was truncated via a SQL backup there was space available and the content deployment could continue!

For sites using Content Deployment regularly I would recommend plenty of disk space, an unlimited transaction log size, and regular incremental backups to ensure the logs are truncated regularly.