Unable to Recover from windows service crash

[Yash Ganthe]

Hi,

We have several windows services implemented in .NET 2.0. They are
configured in production with Recovery enabled such that on failure,
they would restart. There are times when some or the other service has
crashed, due to too much data to be processed or running out of memory
and various other reasons. However, windows was not able to detect the
crash. The exe stopped after the crash but windows never realized it
and hence did not restart. Operation support people had to restart the
services manually.

Any clues on what might be missing in the services?

Thanks,
Yash

 

[MarkusSchaber]

Hi, Yash,

We have several windows services implemented in .NET 2.0. They are
configured in production with Recovery enabled such that on failure,
they would restart. There are times when some or the other service has
crashed, due to too much data to be processed or running out of memory
and various other reasons. However, windows was not able to detect the
crash. The exe stopped after the crash but windows never realized it
and hence did not restart. Operation support people had to restart the
services manually.

Any clues on what might be missing in the services?

Could your operation support people try to look in the task manager or
such whether the process is still running?

I think that it is likely that your services process donesn't actually
crash, it only stops servicing. AFAICS, Windows cannot detect the
difference, and thinks that the service is still running.

Apart from that, you should really dive into the failure reasons, and
try to fix them in your service, and if it is by rejecting requests or
performing a controlled restart in case of failures.

Markus