The Maintenance process monitors the Purchase and Usage objects associated with packages stored in eDirectory. When a purchase expires, the Maintenance process marks it as Expired. Thirty days later (by default), the Maintenance process deletes any expired Purchase objects (and the associated Usage objects) provided that you've marked them as Billed. The Maintenance process will not mark a Purchase object as billed; you must do it manually (see Changing the Status of a Purchase ) or create a utility to do so (see Billing for Purchases ).
You can run multiple Maintenance processes if necessary. However, each process must be responsible for a specific portion of the eDirectory tree. In other words, you cannot have two Maintenance processes maintaining the same Purchase and Usage objects. You control this by using the baseContext setting in the commerceserver.cfg file to specify the base container for the Maintenance process. The Maintenance process will only maintain Purchase and Usage objects located within the base container and its subcontainers. For information about the commerceserver.cfg file, see Modifying the Maintenance and UsageServer Configuration File (Commerceserver.cfg)