Cannot shrink transaction log,no matter what I do

Question

I have a database whose tlog has grown to 4.5 GB. The db is in full recovery mode and I have tried several transaction log backups coupled with DBCC shrinkfile. And it will not shrink. Does anyone have any ideas?

There are several transactions which have a status =2, but there are no active transactions in the database. I wonder why they still show up with status=2.

Answer 1

We had a job writing to the database from another linked server. It was doing some huge deletes. We optimized that job, and were able to shrink the log file successfully down to 100MB.

Thanks!